Our objectives were: - To create a dedicated adult learners' community of Hungarian and Dutch people, in which ongoing dialogue, long-term community learning, and co-created, progressive community initiatives can be born. - To support young disadvantaged individuals to improve their digital skills, literacy and wellness in order to support their employment success in a digital world. - To strengthen the long-term, strategic cooperation between SignCoders and HCAF around digital wellness, that is inclusive to all members of the communities around these organisations. We also wanted to create a learning space where the two partnering organisations and our target groups could learn from one another, based on 1) shared experiences of digital exclusion and 2) diversity of skills/solutions available and accessible in the different communities. It was very fortunate that even if both organisations were inexperienced with Erasmus+ projects, the previous digital-inclusion-related experiences of the different organisations and target groups resulted in lots of co-creation and knowledge-sharing. As a result, all parties involved could learn and grow significantly. A strong cooperation and common knowledge base have been developed.
The proposal was written 2.5 years ago in the second year of the pandemic. It was a time when we had to face lots of social and community challenges among our target groups. Disadvantaged groups (eg. the deaf community, disabled youth, rural youth, people with heavy care loads, low-income women, digitally unskilled ageing individuals etc.) were often in a very difficult situation both economically and socially after nearly two years of lockdowns, illnesses, economic hardships and increased social exclusion. Our aim with the DigInclude project was to set up a European learning structure and ecosystem to support the already-mentioned target groups in digital inclusion, digital literacy and wellness, labour market situation and social inclusion in the IT transition. Also, we felt the need for an Eastern European and a Western European country to join forces and experience about digital inclusion to improve European cohesion in general, and in relation to (digitally) disadvantaged target groups, too. Both partners, being new to Erasmus+, we felt that a digital inclusion-related adult learning project could have a huge positive impact on the partners and the target groups as well.