About the project

"Write your creative story" aims to improve the quality of youth work across the EU regarding development of skills and inclusion through creativity and arts. These skills of the youngsters can foster improvement of their involvement in every sphere in society. During the Covid-19 crisis, many youngsters felt detached from their daily activities, and through the creative text writing and storytelling, we'd like to achieve improved inclusion of this category, to improve cohesion, to find common ground and to start interacting and connecting with one another.

Our objective is to support educators, youth workers and facilitators by enhancing their skills and competences through a Digital Toolkit consisting of new digital tools and workshops that can be performed online and a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for additional education and inclusion.

We want to focus on digital development of youth workers (social workers, artists working with youth, educators), because the traditional youth work in the non-formal education process and programmes is based on methods that require physical presence of the participants. Due to the Covid-19 restrictions, the physical presence became an obstacle and was not recommended. Of course, this varies from a country to a country, but most of the non-formal educational process is transferred online and is rushed, unprepared and finally- postponed or delayed.

It’s a fact that in the year 2020, the world got into one of the biggest crisis situations lately- the Covid-19 pandemic, and all the people around the world certainly weren’t prepared for it. This drastically affected young people in many different negative ways like: economically, mentally, physically and socially. The young people during this period of quarantine, lockdown, restrictions etc. had a lot of free time that they didn’t know how to use productively and beneficiary. Because of this, the development of their creativity was affected- it was decreasing and/or stagnating. It affected the social interaction of young people too.

We as partners in this project, all active in the youth work, fully endorse to this conclusion.

The main objective of the project is developing new and innovative tools: Digital Toolkit and a MOOC based on digital creative text writing and digital inspirational storytelling, that can be used for boosting creativity of young people, inclusion and social connection among them. We chose these two fields deliberately, because in our experience, they showed to be effective, successful and popular. Combining these two will helps young people connect, find similarities, resocialise and become more active and creative.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Other important objectives of this project are: - Enhancing skills & competences of youth workers; - Strengthening collaboration and cooperation between partner organisations.

Target groups: - primary: youth workers, educators, artists, cultural workers etc. - secondary: youth facing decrease of creativity/motivation.

Storytelling as a method, existing of a set of exercises, provides the target groups: - possibility to talk about differences and similarities; - skills to listen to one another, to create mutual respect and understanding and to give the youth a future perspective; - self-confidence and self-respect; - collaboration skills; - intercultural communication skills; - ability and skills to structure thoughts; - expression skills; - discussion skills.

The creative text writing provides the target groups with: -building confidence; - improvement of artistic self-expression; - imagination boost; - thought clarification; - better understanding of the mechanics of reading and writing; - improvement of empathy and communication skills; - better mental, emotional, and physical health.