International Virtual Youth Centre Erasmus Project

Project Title

International Virtual Youth Centre

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: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

The year 2020 will be historically known as the COVID-19 year of great pandemic. The whole world shut down for a few months and even when the lockdowns and curfews were lifted, our societies have witnessed a notoriously change. In some ways, the effect of this pandemic will be temporary until a cure has been found, but for some fields the pandemic has been a turning point that will condition and modify their procedures. This is as well the advantage since it challenges had made us and our work more flexible and created the offers outside of our regular working plan.
During the lockdown, resources dedicated to youth had to readapt themselves in order to continue offering services to their users, youngsters. In this case, we can say that fortunately we live in the tech and internet era, and we were able to use it in our favour. The applicant with the youth centre which it is running decided to continue their agenda of activities virtually, using popular platforms, and asking and listening constantly to the youngsters what kind content they would enjoy. This is a method used from the open youth work methodology where local and small activities in youth centers are designed in accordance with the needs and wishes of youngsters. Concurrently, the applicant together with the Romanian partner and other European organizations, created the International Virtual Youth Centre platform, where a diverse profile of people related with youth would upload audio-visual content with the goal of entertaining and educating at the same time youngsters from all over Europe.
Among the partnership of six different European organizations dedicated to the youth field, the ongoing project wants to continue this beta project that started during the lockdown, explore new realities due to COVID-19 and innovate in the methods on the implementation of a virtual youth centre in Europe. We want to create a platform where the youngsters can find the offer and resources that they also find in the physical youth centre, with constant accessibility to their referents, the youth workers.
In this project the main target group and participants coincide – for we will ask them what they need and wish, will participate in the creation of content and then will become a beneficiary of this new tool. Also we want the youth workers to improve their vision about the changes that COVID-19 raised on the youth and increase their skills on media content, doing a training activity which will be applied separately and who focus will be on the instant media presentations, creations of videos, processing and postprocessing.
The project will create three intellectual outputs – IO. The first one will be a survey to fifteen youngsters active in organizations daily work in every partner country, with which we want to collect the needs and changes caused by the virus and answers on what kind of platform and audio-visual content they would like to have. The second one, will be the mentioned webpage/platform and the creation of specific audiovisual content from each of the partners and in accordance with IO1. And as a third and closing intellectual output we want to create a digital handbook, that will gather the results of the survey and the experiences on the platform from every partner, its youth workers and young people.
In order to achieve these objectives and results, we target a project duration of 24 months (March 2021 to March 2023). For a successful accomplishment of our milestones and discussions, we will have five transnational meetings in the different countries besides a monthly steering online meeting. Moreover, once the third intellectual output is finished, we plan to do a multiplier event in each of the partners’ countries in the format of a symposium so we can disseminate the results, share experiences and motivate other youth organizations to follow our steps.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 146909 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNTERNEHMERGESELLSCHAFT HAFTUNGSBESCHRANKT ROTER BAUM BERLIN & Country: DE

Project Partners

• RAZISKOVALNO IZOBRAŽEVALNO SREDIŠČE DVOREC RAKIČAN
• ASOCIATIA CURBA DE CULTURA
• ASSOCIAZIONE CULTURALE COMALA
• UDRUZENJE CRVENO DRVO
• Taller d’Art, Cultura i Creació
• Strauss APS