The project's primary goal is to overcome barriers between HEIs and NGOs in digital co-creation projects. The use of the digital CoCreAid Kit will enhance digital competencies among these partners and extend access to citizens in rural areas, helping to address social challenges. As we develop the CoCreAid Kit, we'll demonstrate its impact on simplifying collaboration and boosting social engagement. Co-creation projects between NGOs and HEIs are increasingly crucial due to the increasing amount of social challenges in our society. These challenges can be addressed through successful co-creation between HEIs and NGOs. Particularly interest groups from rural areas are struggling to collaborate with HEIs, due to the special distance. Thus, the specific objectives of this project are: • To create awareness and understanding of transfer barriers in co-creation projects between HEIs and NGOs (PR1) • To develop a digital toolkit (PR2) • To increase digital capacity among HEI, NGO and citizens (PR3) • To improve the inclusion of citizens from rural areas via NGOs in projects with HEIs (PR3) • To scale the use of the digital tools to a broad target group, via multiplier events (PR4)
We applied for the CoCreAid project to enhance social engagement between European higher education institutions (HEIs) and NGOs (particularly working with citizens from rural areas), addressing a key need highlighted in the European Commission's Higher Education Modernisation Agenda (2017). Driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing trend of collaborations taking place entirely or partially in digital spaces due to significant physical distances, more and more collaborations between HEIs and NGOs are now being conducted digitally. A needs analysis by MUAS revealed that many of these projects fail due to a lack of effective digital tools. Thus, the CoCreAid project aims to develop a digital toolkit (CoCreAid Kit) to support collaboration between HEIs and NGOs, overcoming barriers specific to digital co-creation projects between HEIs NGOs working together with citizens from rural areas. By adapting methods from various disciplines to the co-creation context, CoCreAid provides digital tools to bridge social and spatial gaps, integrate rural citizens, and enhance co-creation projects, increasing the quality of thus project and their success, finally raising social impact across Europe.