Youth Arts Projects – Learning Leadership Skills Erasmus Project

Project Title

Youth Arts Projects – Learning Leadership Skills

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: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Creativity and culture; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

This ‘sharing of practices’ project grew from our ambition to develop a collaborative and accredited ‘Learning Leadership Through the Arts’ programme that would allow young creative people who do not ‘fit’ the established educational structure to gain official recognition for their work on arts projects.
This in turn helped us (all partners) to realise that the core issue was to first understand how each of our organisations actually took a project with young people from ‘idea’ stage to completion and performance. What natural phases does the project go through? How could we capture the creative process without putting strictures on it that would undermine the reason why this form of activity is so popular with these young people. We agreed that we should first share this practice, document it and record it, across a multicultural field to ensure we did not end up with any ‘nationality specific’ document.
Our objective is for each partner to mentor six to ten young people in each organisation to enter an intense creative period where they develop an idea into a complete work. They attend a final performance, where all groups deliver their work in front of a large audience. This will also be filmed for dissemination through our websites and other media outlets available to us.
During the ‘creative period’ each Artistic director and Tutor will work very closely with the young people to track the steps they naturally take to reach their goal. These steps will then be studied and compared to see if there is a common pattern emerging, was the process similar in each country or juxtaposed in how it was approached by different groups.
Ultimately this information will then be assembled into ‘one’ process that captures all the ‘natural’ requirements of the different nationalities. From this information we will compare the ‘steps’ taken in the process to the basic leadership steps of create a vision, plan, organise, lead, measure, control, perform and evaluate. These results will allow us begin the process of mapping the different discipline areas carried out on an arts project to those on a formal leadership course and thus prepare the way to build a consensus with educational establishments and governments to allow accreditation for this type of youth arts work.
We see this work as a major benefit to all those young people who for whatever reason do not ‘fit’ the formal structures but can excel in a creative environment that is less judgemental and more welcoming.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 34771,71 Eur

Project Coordinator

Waterford Youth Arts Ltd. & Country: IE

Project Partners

• Stella Polaris EVS
• TEATRUL NATIONAL TIRGU-MURES