Our project aimed to: 1: Equip youth workers with essential digital skills, including the use of digital tools and awareness of key issues such as online safety, cyberbullying, navigating social media, and recognizing fake content. 2: Empower youth workers to integrate digital topics into seminars, trainings, youth exchanges, and workcamps, raising awareness about both the positive and negative aspects of digitalization. 3: Develop a policy with clear guidelines and procedures for implementing digital education within the organization. These objectives support digital transformation by strengthening digital readiness, resilience, and capacity among youth workers and the young people they support. By gaining digital skills, youth workers can confidently navigate the digital landscape and embed digital topics into their programs, fostering digital resilience in themselves and participants. This ensures young people engage in activities that build digital literacy, critical thinking, and responsible digital citizenship. A digital policy further ensures the quality and sustainability of digital education within our organizations.
Educating young people about cyberbullying and fake news is increasingly challenging as AI makes it harder to distinguish real from fake. False information, images and voices are widespread, yet it remains essential to empower young people to behave responsibly online and use the internet to strengthen creativity, self-development and global citizenship. We therefore saw the need to integrate these topics into our programmes, raising awareness about both the benefits and risks of digitalisation and developing methods for informal learning. By creating Digital Policies for the 2 partners,we want to contribute to ongoing policy discussions with concrete recommendations and tools. Equipping youth workers with digital skills enabled them to integrate these themes into activities, improve programme quality, address challenges such as online safety and cyberbullying and support young people’s development in a digital society. This aligned with programme objectives and allowed us, as newcomers to the Small-Scale Partnership format and with recent staff changes, to ensure effective knowledge transfer.