#Creativity @Nature Erasmus Project

Project Title

#Creativity @Nature

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 : Partnerships for Creativity

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Target groups
1.) Project team: 4 countries; 2 organizations per country (1 organization active in youth work related to outdoors/nature and active life-style and 1 organization from creative industries/arts); each organization represented by 1-2 representatives = 9 members in project core team (and 7 more in the extended team);
2.) Peers – colleagues and friends from similar youth work organizations (also summer camp leaders, representatives from youth centres, educators) and other artists and people involved in creative industries – both in our countries, but other countries as well;
3.) Young people that will be participating in our activities during the project and after;
4.) Communities in 4 countries where we work, live and want to make positive changes

The GENERAL IDEA of this project is to exchange experiences and know-how between us – 4 youth work organizations active in using outdoor approach and 4 organizations active in arts/creative field from Latvia, Georgia, Portugal and Italy and try out different tools/practices on how to promote creativity in ourselves, young people and communities through non-formal activities in the nature. It will allow us to get inspired from each other, build capacities to cooperate and co-create and allow us to include more consciously creativity development dimension and learning in/from/through the nature dimension in our work and thus to reach out to young people and communities more effectively.

OBJECTIVES
1.) To promote interdisciplinary co-operation – locally and internationally – in order to strengthen their capacities of local youth work and international cooperation and provide a space to learn from each other.
2.) To discuss how Covid-19 has affected our youth work practices, connection among people, forms of active participation and social inclusion, and explore how developing the skills and competencies for creativity of youth work providers and young people can serve as a solution for us to be better prepared to face unprecedented risks, deal with societal challenges and contribute to positive changes.
3.) To research more how creativity works outdoors and in the nature and define a set of concrete competences that we consider crucial to develop among young people
4.) To discover and test different tools for promoting creativity in the nature by sharing good practices from our past experiences (both in youth work and also the artists) and experimenting together for developing new ideas.
5.) To create a Digital Toolbox with descriptions (textual and visual) of 30+ ideas for promoting creativity in nature (and other valuable results from project) and share it in youth work and creative communities in our countries and beyond.
6.) To promote the idea of being more offline, outdoors and in the nature as a crucial way to be more connected to oneself, each other, community and the nature and being creative.

The project will last for 21 months. It will be based on many local activities created by the youth workers in cooperation with their creative colleagues. It will include also 2 transnational partner meetings and 2 international learning activities that allow the partners to meet and exchange experiences between the countries.

We expect this project to be a great boost for learning for our organizations and members who will be part of the team. We expect them to be more empowered, more creative, confident and we expect many professional and personal friendships to be created. As a follow-up of this project further international projects would be born. We hope that next projects would enable our young people to be involved even more actively, so these could be youth exchanges, youth initiatives, etc.

Digital Toolbox will be one of the most tangible results of our project (.pdf or in the page), it will include 40+ description of tools tried out during the project, the framework of CREATIVITY components/competences (presented in a form of infographics) and also 16+ stories of experiences from this project by team members and participants of activities. To make the promotion of project even more effective, we will also make a short video that promotes main project results.

For us it is crucial that young people not only experience “awakening” of their creativity, recognize it and gain many new tools for promoting it, but we also will support the process of transferring this to real life – realizing how this kind of seemingly abstract creativity can help them in being fulfilled and successful persons in their personal and social life and motivate them to take responsibility and be innovators in their communities.

As the project conciously targets also young people with fewer opportunities, through project activities we also aim to promote their inclusion and empowerment.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 53589 Eur

Project Coordinator

Sporta klubs Teku Taku & Country: LV

Project Partners

• NON FORMAL EDUCATION YOUTH CENTRE SUNNY HOUSE
• Società Cooperativa Dendrocopos
• BRIGADA DO MAR – UNIÃO
• asd Moveway
• LAUKKU
• ASSOCIAÇÃO NOVO MUNDO AZUL
• Association of Georgian Girl Scouts “Dia”