The Fatherhood, gender roles and parenting, project aims to meet the need of young fathers (18-30 years old) for training and support in their role as parents. The project builds on an innovative approach to youth training focusing on young fathers as the main target group. The main objective is to empowering and training young fathers to actively engage in the parenting role. The end product of the project will be online training for young fathers open and accessible in partner languages, English, Spanish, Greek and Icelandic. The target group will be engaged using direct and indirect approaches. Direct participation through young fathers involvement in training and video production and indirect participation using social media forums like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube as well as organized online events on Zoom with experts and trainers. This will ensure that the outputs produced in the project are developed with and for young fathers. A total of 20 peers or young fathers will be involved in peer training and video production, 5 from each partner country, as well as partners will involve reference groups of 8-10 professionals and peers in each country that will actively engage in the development of project outputs. A total of 40 young fathers will be involved in the piloting of the online training, providing feedback to the finalization of the Fatherhood learning platform. Unforeseen number of fathers will follow project outcomes either individual videos or take partner in the overall training program. The online training will include training content and videos. The Fatherhood training package will be designed using methods of positive psychology, emotional intelligence and mindfulness as well as coaching, character education and motivational techniques, partners will produce a central curriculum including learning objectives and applied methodology that can then be transferred to other regions/countries and groups within Europe. Peer videos or interviews with 5 selected young fathers from each participants country in their language, interviews with 4-6 professionals in English that will be subtitles in partner languages as part of the training material. A handbook for producer will be published online in English providing information and necessary tools for preparation, directing and production of the Fatherhood videos as well as a description of the overall reviewing process and cooperation with the young fathers and professionals involved. Partners believe that project will greatly impact all young fathers and that the material and training developed will be sustainable and practical for our target group of young fathers both within the Fatherhood training platform as well as on relevant training and communication platforms adapting and using material and methodologies designed within the project. The objective is that after project finalization social media forums and channels will continue to be both active and helpful for young fathers.
The main objective of the project is to develop outputs that empower young fathers to actively engage in parenting roles. To reach this objective the partnership felt that further analysis was needed reflecting as well upon cultural and societal differences between countries about the fatherhood role. Based upon insights gathered from this phase of the project partners wanted to develop training and open educational resources that could be used both within their organizations, by stakeholders and for self-learning. They created content for wider dissemination through the production of the Fatherhood videos including interviews with young fathers on their lived experience and professionals about research and practitioners’ insights into fatherhood and empowerment of fathers. Partners' foresight is to further exploit and develop project results in their content production (documentary or short docs), community work, and training with different groups of fathers like fathers with migrant backgrounds as well as good practice in international collaborations.
Our partnership applied for this project recognizing the unmet need for support and training for young fathers in their parenting roles. Despite a growing desire among fathers to be more involved in their children's upbringing, they often feel unsupported and lack necessary training. The idea for the project stemmed from a young father's realization of this need and his initiative to gather content for a documentary on fatherhood. Partnering social enterprises, focusing on community group training, joined in with the hypothesis that today's fathers seek greater involvement but lack support. The project aimed to objectively explore young fathers' needs through GAP analysis across partner countries and develop a training program and open educational resources (OERs). Quasar's ongoing work on the Fatherhood documentary aims to promote gender equality in parenting roles, while other partners continue to utilize developed OERs and Fatherhood videos in their training programs.