The Covid-19 situation has led to an increase in the proportion of young people who cannot find work. These rates are particularly high among young people who have decided to pursue a career in arts. The opportunities they have to market their production are very limited. Very few of them manage to get the chance to exhibit their work in galleries, so they are increasingly using the opportunities provided by the Internet. In response to these needs, the Youth Digital Kickstart project aimed to "Identify, transfer and implement innovative practices in the field of art by building skills in digitizing and developing next generation NFT - non fungible token art". We achieved this by: building partnerships with a focus on employment; implementing collaborations related to the exchange of experiences, good practices and models to ensure sustainable youth employment; raising public awareness through the dissemination and transfer of the innovative outcomes resulting from the applied practice. At the end of the project, we report that we have achieved all the set objectives and built on our initial experience.
The employment of young people, especially in small settlements, faces a number of obstacles that are a significant barrier to their professional integration. Difficulties are even greater in a pandemic context as this hinders the effective participation of young people and their sustainable integration into the labour market. The motivation of the Youth Digital Kickstart project team, No. 2022-1-BG01-KA210-YOU-000081205 was to offer opportunities to reduce these negative effects by offering the possibility of inclusion, through innovative technologies such as blockchain and NFT, which are highly relevant and their application is growing at a very fast pace in a large number of industries. The NFT market is new and growing dynamically. It provides many opportunities for development and professional realization in it is not influenced by geographical location. Through its implementation, the project has achieved building an innovative blockchain platform for offering NFT products, which has provided many young people with the opportunity to successfully realize their creative projects in the field of digital arts.