Case Management Tool for Non-formal Education in Youth Work Erasmus Project

Project Title

Case Management Tool for Non-formal Education in Youth Work

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

We noticed that more and more children are falling out of the formal systems. The streets become the main educational environment where they develop their identity with needed attitudes and skills in order to survive. Youth work is confronted with children in different street situations. Many NGO’s (big and small), citizen initiatives undertake a lot of action to connect with the children in the streets, to build trustworthy relationships. Mobile School VZW has been supporting these initiatives for 15 years with non-formal educational tools and training.

In all the projects we’ve been cooperating, we saw 3 problems:
– a lack of a qualitative case-management. Youth workers lack the tools and capacity to give a proper follow-up to the individual children and youth they are working with.
– a lack of impact measurement: There is a lack of concrete indicators to follow-up and a poor data registration.
– a lack of data to assess the situation: data collection about the situation of children and youth in the streets are extremely difficult. Proper reports and macro data on the situation of vulnerable children and youth are missing and therefore it’s difficult to make policy decisions on a project level, on national and on an international level.

This project was a transnational collaboration between 4 organisations. Mobile School VZW was the leading organisation and partnered up with 3 organisations, having experience with different target groups: ARSIS and PRAKSIS (Greece) and CME (Poland). In ARSIS and PRAKSIS, they work with Roma children, trafficked children in the city centre, refugee children in refugee camps and unaccompanied minors. CME works with children and youth who are working unregistered on the streets with the responsibility to sustain their families.

Our goal was to create a digital tool for personal case management within youth work in non-formal education. We managed to create that tool, named StreetSmart, split out in 3 intellectual outputs.
The aim of the research report (IO1) was that it should help youth workers to evaluate and improve their own activities and case management. The report answers the following questions:
– How is case management perceived in street- and youth work?
– Which (mobile) case management tools already exist worldwide?
– Which indicators are useful in assessing impact in non-formal youth work activities?
– How can the indicators ‘non-formal education’ and ‘personal development’ be included in the measurement?
– How can the data of children and youngsters be protected?

The case management tool, StreetSmart, exists of 3 parts:
– A very user-friendly smartphone application for data caption on the streets (O2)
– A database back-end (O2)
– A web-based case management environment where info, reports and analyses can be consulted (O3)

To carry out the project we went through 3 phases: a research, development and testing phase.
– Acquired a list of common indicators useful to assess impact in non-formal educational youth work activities
– developed valid and trustworthy methods to measure indicators.
– developed a protected database system where data of individual children can be stored safely
– developed a user-friendly application where youth workers can input and consult only the data of the children they are working with
– developed a data-encryption system so data become anonymously once they leave the project level (privacy protected)
– developed user-friendly dashboards and reports to view macro-data on a project level, per indicator, per target group.
– and we are still trying to develop a sustainable way to disseminate the tool to youth workers in other European projects and all over the world, organising multipliers and sharing the tool with networks active in youth work.

In the end, we foresee an educational, efficiency and managerial win for everyone who will use this case management tool. The project foresaw to impact 3691 persons, but probably we reached around 3551: 291 youth workers with O1, 150 children and 110 youth workers (through multipliers and scaling: + 3000 newsletters).

Our ambition is to continue with the dissemination and support of the tool after the completion of this project (1 year). Our aim is within three years after the start of the project, to reach at least 300 organisations and youth initiatives outside our own network, working with approximately 9000 children and support them with the tool and online training on how to use it.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 102198,6 Eur

Project Coordinator

Mobile School VZW & Country: BE

Project Partners

• ARSIS KOINONIKI ORGANOSI YPOSTIRIXIS NEON
• Centrum Misji i Ewangelizacji Kosciola Ewangelicko-Augsburskiego w RP
• PRAKSIS