TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Karlo Brunović
The main objective of the project was increasing the quality and effectiveness of youth work by improving the digital skills of youth workers in reaching out to and supporting young people with fewer opportunities in their daily work.
Specific objectives included increasing media literacy and digital competencies of 22 youth workers from eight EU countries; equipping youth workers with non-formal tools and methods needed to promote digital and media literacy among youth with fewer opportunities; and enabling the exchange of good practices of reaching out to and supporting young people with fewer opportunities through digital youth work.
Youth in partners’ communities faced similar problems due to obstacles to social and cultural
participation. Some faced geographical isolation and social obstacles (in Croatia, Italy, Lithuania and Portugal), others faced cultural obstacles due to their different cultural or ethnic background (in Latvia and Spain), while some faced a general lack of competencies needed for active social participation and employment (in Slovakia and Slovenia). On the other hand, young people are increasingly engaging with new technologies and digital media. Being immersed in an online world since early childhood, they are digital natives. However, youth workers of partnering organisations still lacked crucial digital competencies needed to keep up with youth. Fostering engagement and reducing social exclusion of disadvantaged youth was one of the fundamental tasks of partners involved in this project.
Participants were youth workers from Italy, Croatia, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia - project managers, project coordinators, teachers, social workers, volunteers working with disadvantaged groups of youth.
I have used World Café to engage participants in sharing their vision of digital youth work. I used a digital storytelling exercise "Brian the Onion" to open up discussions and increase awareness on how online pictures and video may have impact on our perception of others, distort reality, or how easily labels can be attached to people due to what appears in their online profiles. I have also introduced participants to fallacies and biases crucial for media literacy and given them practical task to recognise them in examples. Furthermore, I was leading Open Space sessions and facilitated group reflections each training day.
After the training, participants are more competent in digital youth work with disadvantaged groups and in their youth work practice in general. They are more skilled to utilise the potential of digital youth work with by providing better services or initiating new projects in their local communities and on the international level. Moreover, participants can more successfully address the needs of disadvantaged youth. By sharing their knowledge and experience in youth work with disadvantaged youth
groups, participants gained new insights from colleagues from partner organisations, including knowledge of tools ready to implement in their local practice.
The project resulted in several outputs. Firstly, digital brochure "Using digital youth work to reach
disadvantaged youth" (http://bit.ly/2thLCeU) available on Salto with a collection of insights and practical non-formal methods applicable in the context of digital youth work, with a special emphasis on disadvantaged youth. Secondly, short video “Discover new opportunities with Erasmus+” aiming to promote youth’s, especially
disadvantaged ones’, involvement in the Erasmus+ programme. It can be watched on YouTube (http://bit.ly/2LGoHAk). Info about the project: https://www.udrugaprizma.hr/digital-natives
As a trainer in this project, I was responsible for sessions on digitalisation, critical thinking and media, as well as digital safety, information and data literacy. Moreover, I was providing organisational and logistic support and coordinating the project. I had also taken care of the implementation of the participants' preparation.