The Digital Youth Work Project aims to build capacity to deliver digital youth work at local, national, regional and European levels. It is a transnational Erasmus+ project with seven partners from six different countries across Europe and it is implemented during 2017-2019.
The project partners are YouthLink Scotland, Centre for Digital Youth Care (Denmark), Verke – The National Digital Youth Work Centre (Finland), wienXtra MedienZentrum (Austria), JFF – Institut für Medienpädagogik (Germany), National Youth Council of Ireland and Camara Education Limited (Ireland).
As a partnership, we believe that quality youth work that meets young people’s needs must, in this modern era, include digital considerations. This does not mean that every youth worker should be a technical expert, but that a recognition that young people are growing up in a digital era and that they need support to navigate the online aspects of their lives and critically analyse online information/ interaction is becoming increasingly central to youth work.
There is also huge potential within the youth work sector to enhance and innovate practice through the use of digital technology and media and to use non formal and informal learning to help young people to create digital content and shape the digital world of the future.
However, alongside these needs and opportunities there is also a lack of confidence, competence, strategic planning and investment to enable the youth work sector to fully embrace these developments. This project aims to increase capacity of the youth work sector to engage with these two areas by offering training, guidance and best practice sharing to practitioners and managers to help incorporate digital youth work into their planning. It also creates opportunities to raise the profile of and showcase the value of digital youth work.
Thereby the project objectives will promote quality youth work through supporting open and innovative practices in a digital era. The Digital Youth Work Project objectives are:
– Share good digital youth work practice across Europe leading to improved practice and innovation within the European youth work community
– Build capacity of youth workers to respond to digitalisation through training that meets their needs
– Improve digital youth work planning and the development of digital youth work strategies through increasing awareness of managers of ethical and organisational considerations and requirements of digital youth work
– Raise awareness of digital youth work within the youth work sector and to policy makers and funders nationally and EU wide
The project produces three outputs:
– Good practice collection of 36 good practices in total
– Digital Youth Work Training Resources to be used in youth worker tranings
– European Guidelines for Digital Youth Work
The methodology to create these outputs includes an innovative Training Jam process as well as training, networking and consultation within the sector. There will be national multiplier events in each country and a final International Digital Youth Work Summit in September 2019 to showcase innovative practice in digital youth work and launch the European Guidelines for Digital Youth Work.