Youth Worker 2.0

Digital literacy and 21st century skills play a crucial role as part of modern-day citizenship and modern life in general, and youth work should be able to encourage this. Youth workers need an agile mindset, being willing to try new things and learn from both success and failure, and be supported to do so.
Young people in Europe spend increasing amounts of time using and working with digital media. They live in digital spaces where they learn, share experiences and opinions, have fun with friends and actively participate in society. It is obvious that youth work has to follow suit. Youth work must itself become 'digital'.

"Digital youth work" means proactively using or addressing digital media and technology in youth work. Digital media and technology can be either a tool, an activity or a content in youth work. Digital youth work is not a youth work method. Digital youth work can be included in any youth work setting and it has the same goals as youth work in general. Digital youth work can happen in face-to-face situations as well as in online environments, or in a mixture of the two. Digital youth work is underpinned by the same ethics, values and principles as youth work.

The overall aim of the project is to provide youth workers and NGOs with the adequate and up to date measures-knowledge, skills, competences and experience in digital youth work in order to engage more effectively young people, even those who are marginalized.

Project objectives:
-To provide deeper understanding of the concept of digital youth work;
-To provide practical tools and increase the digital skills and knowledge for better volunteer management, online activism and online communication;
-To strengthen the potential and capacity of the NGOs to better correspond to the nowadays needs of the young people by integrating technology and digital tools into everyday youth work;
-Raising quality and innovation in non-formal education through capacity building in online learning management systems, methods, tools and media literacy of youth workers;
-Raising quality and modernizing youth work methods and approaches through capacity building in developing and running youth work activities using digital media tools;
-Contribute to creation of establishment of the knowledge foundation on topics of mentorship in youth work, online learning, digital tools to support youth work delivering, providing training, of working methods, tools and materials;
-Contribute to personal development of youth workers towards professionalization of youth work;

By implementing the project, we expect to raise awareness among NGOs and youth workers about the importance of digital tools to reach out more youth in an easier, youth friendly and smarter way, which will also make youth work more efficient. The participants will be introduced to good practices of digital tools to help their daily work with youth-for volunteer management, communication with team members and volunteers, digital tools to online activism, for project management. By introducing the concept of digital youth work, good practices in the field, concrete digital tools as well as knowledge and information about digitalization we expect to invest in the capacity of the youth workers thus the NGOs involved which will reflect in the quality of the youth services they offer. By acquiring the knowledge, skills and competences in digital youth work, online activism and digital tools, the youth workers will become more efficient in their everyday work with young people, will easily communicate, will be able to reach out more youth trough online tools, will become better in online activism. Moreover, this project can give an impulse for the NGOs involved to start transforming their youth services, to become more efficient and able to answer the needs of the modern youth accordingly.

Activities
1.) Kick of meeting of the partner organizations;
2.) Training course for online learning ;
3)Desk and field reasearch concerning the actual use of digital skills in youth work in each partner country;
4)Seminar on online learning in non-formal education;
5)Conceptualisation of a common framework of the competencies a digital youth worker should posses the specific competences required by youth workers in order to better navigate in the digital area and therefore enhance their skills and better the provision of youth work locally, nationally and internationally.
6)Online platform for online learning developing;
7)Creation of manuals and informational materials;
8)Dissemination and exploitation activities.

Mod of Life is looking for partners with proven experience in the field, willing to futher cooperate in the framework of this project. Those interested should send us by e-mail attached PIF and latest annual reports of the NGO. Only selected partners will be contacted.