We wanted to increase the accessibility of theatre for youth and support their holistic development through artistic content. Our first goal was to thoroughly research the needs of young people with fewer opportunities. In addition, we set ourselves the goal of strengthening youth workers, mentors, and educators in organisations that already worked with youth but needed additional support in working with young people with fewer opportunities. The second goal was to provide youth with fewer opportunities with a continuous theatre experience to develop a more positive attitude towards culture. Through exercises, we wanted to encourage empathy, reflection, cooperation, responsibility, acceptance of diversity and self-initiative. We also wanted to provide youth with international experience, introduce them to new approaches, and strengthen their creativity and solidarity. We have set ourselves the goal of developing high-quality materials and methods and actively disseminating them to motivate and empower youth workers, theatre educators, teachers, and others outside the partnership to work with young people. We also shared our findings with decision-makers in the form of policy recommendations, thus taking our first step in advocacy.
We applied for the project because we wanted to address the need for greater accessibility to theatre for youth with fewer opportunities. We noticed that young people from vulnerable backgrounds and young people with mental health issues were less likely to participate in theatre activities in the participating organisations, so we wanted to actively encourage them to get involved. At the same time, we wanted to empower youth workers and theatre educators. In our needs analysis, the partner organisations identified a lack of knowledge among mentors to work effectively with the diverse needs of young people. The project therefore strengthened their skills and gave them the tools for safer, more inclusive, and more effective group leadership. We also addressed the need to develop emotional intelligence and active citizenship among young people. Theatre methods proved to be a good way to build empathy, self-awareness, communication, social skills, and expression of opinion, while also enabling the opening up of social issues. We also decided to systematically monitor the effects of theatre methods, as there was a lack of concrete evidence in this area.