Connecting and improving peer intervention in nightlife settings on EU level Erasmus Project

Project Title

Connecting and improving peer intervention in nightlife settings on EU level

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Open and distance learning

Project Summary

Peer workers are an important part of youth work in nightlife prevention for young people, because they can approach their peers more easily than adult experts. Beside that they are often partygoers themselves and know different nightlife environments and dynamics well from the first hand. With appropriate knowledge and skills they can contribute a lot to developemnt of the prevention and harm reduction activities in the nightlife settings. On the other hand, nightlife, parties and music festivals are an important part of life of young people in general. It’s a setting where they can socialize and grow their social capital, relax, get new experiences and also be creative and express themselves in different ways (creating music, performing visual arts, dancing, …). But it’s also a setting related to variety of risks, connected with alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, intoxicated driving, risky environment (for example high temperature in the club). We see this risks also as an opportunity for young people to act responsibly in order to reduce risks, encourage them to be critical to unsafe party environments and develop solidarity and helping skills towards other young people in trouble. Intervention in nightlife settings is also a field where different profession profiles meet and share their expertise and knowledge (for example medicine staff, social workers and pedagogues, youth workers, chemists, psychologists), therefore there are a lot of opportunities for peer workers to get some insight in their work and non-formal knowledge and experience on those topics, which can be useful for their future personal and professional development. The international aspect of nightlife is also important, as we also meet people from other countries during our work (Erasmus students, tourists, international visitors of festivals and parties, …). And on the other hand we see international networking as an important opportunity to make an effective experience, knowledge and good practice exchange. In our experience, international cooperation always brought fresh ideas and different perspectives into our organisation and helped us improve our work.

Main aims of the project:
– to create peers’ community in order to exchange and share information, knowledge and experience for peer workers and youth work trainers, discuss opportunities for joint projects – proposals, progress and continuation of projects once funding runs out, share opportunities and coordinate international field work on festivals and parties.
– to represent peer work in nightlife settings as important part of youth work in general.

Number and profile of participating organizations:
7 organization (from Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Scottland, Germany and Slovenia), active on the field of prevention and harm reduction in the nightlife settings

Description of the main activities:
– 3 transnational project meeting: peer representatives met personally on three meetings, where they get know and connect with each other, planned and monitored project development, learnt new things (on video workshop and the workshop, where special method of drug testing was presented), created project contents together (international mobile info point, project video presentation) and exchanged experiences.
– blended mobiliy in Portugal, where participants attended international training, got practical learning experience about working methods of the hosting organization and opportunity to exchange ideas with other participants.
– making contents for web platform (vides, articles, projects’ presentations),
– performing local peer work activities with the educational material developed within the project (info quizzes, audio leaflefts, …), good practice exchange (mobile info points, cooler fan info leaflet, …) and development of innovative educational tools (mobile application).

Results and achieved efftects:
Established web platform with web forum, with 72 different youth peer workers from 10 different organizations from 8 different European countries. Web site, which presents youth peer work in the nightlife settings, consists of 9 different informative and educational video contents created by now in the project (and viewed 1.616 times) and 26 different articles about peer work and PINS project activities. Another important effect is upgrade of local peer work, where organizations are active and improvements of key competences and enhancement motivation for future work on the field of the youth peer workers included in the project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 72984 Eur

Project Coordinator

Slovensko zdruzenje za zmanjsevanje skodljivih posledic drog – DrogArt & Country: SI

Project Partners

• CGG Vagga
• Crew 2000 Scotland Ltd
• SZL Suchtzentrum gGmbH
• STICHTING ARKIN
• AGENCIA PIAGET PARA O DESENVOLVIMENTO
• ABD ASOCIACIÓN BIENESTAR Y DESARROLLO