Program: Erasmus+
Key Action: Social Inclusion through Education, Training and Youth
Project Total Duration: 24 months
Start Date: 01/12/2017
Project nº: 592182-EPP-1-2017-1-UK-EPPKA3-IPI-SOC-IN
1. PARTNERSHIP
Promoter
ARCOLA RESEARCH LLP, Londres (UK)
Partners
UNIVERSIDAD INTERNACIONAL DE LA RIOJA SA, Spain; COMUNE DI PERUGIA, Italy; KETHEA – Therapy Center for Dependent Individuals, Greece; BORGORETE, Italy; LIFELONG LEARNING PLATFORM, Belgium; Docklands Outreach Company Limited, United Kingdom; MindInn, Greece; DOCUMENTA, Spain
2. OVERVIEW
Relevant Topics
– ICT – new technologies – digital competences
– Access for disadvantaged
– Early School Leaving / combating failure in education
– Inclusion – equity
– Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong) learning
– Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development)
Description
A new role is needed in youth work, one that enables youth workers to ‘step into the shoes’ of marginalised young people, understand their needs, and provide a credible and trusted source of support to help hard to reach young people realise their potential and play an active role in improving their communities. We describe this role as ‘Community Animateur’. The Community Animateur acts as a bridge between hard to reach young people and the ‘system’ of formal youth services from which they feel alienated. The Community Animateur plays the vital role of persuading marginalized young people that they can contribute to helping themselves and their communities by taking an active role in their community’s social, cultural and civic life.
The main objectives of COMANITY, therefore, are to develop a new youth work and volunteering role – the ‘Community Animateur’ -and provide a competence framework and training programme to support that role. The competence framework and training programme will then act as a ‘test case’ for exploring how existing youth work and volunteer competence and accreditation frameworks can be improved. The advanced competences acquired by youth workers – and the civic competences acquired by young volunteers – through participating in COMANITY will then be put into practice and evaluated through action research experiments in five EU cities, involving hard to reach young people collaborating with youth organisations to deliver community-transforming services.
The activities planned to implement the project methodology combine: ‘lifeworld analysis’ of the issues faced by marginalized young people; a review of competence frameworks, leading to the development of a ‘Community Animateur’ competence framework; development of the COMANITY Technical platform and Learning Village; Development of the Community Animateur training programme; piloting of the training programme with a core group of youth workers and volunteers; evaluation of the pilot and the project as a whole; a Dissemination and Replication strategy and plan; Project Management.
Participation in the training programme will lead to: an increase in core EI, domain and role specific youth work and volunteer competences, an increase in applied practice knowledge, increased professionalisation and transferable skills, and, ultimately, a new role as a ‘Community Animateur’.
At the societal level, the project will make a contribution to increasing the quality of youth work in Europe and beyond, better alignment of youth systems to the needs of and opportunities offered by the labour market, closer links to business and the community and more strategic and integrated use of ICTs and open educational resources (OER) by youth systems, better support for the integration of young third-country migrants into EU society.
3. TARGET GROUPS
The ‘end beneficiaries’ of the project are marginalised and at risk young people, specifically:
• Young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs)
• Young people from a migrant background
• Young people who are hard to teach (those at risk of dropping out of formal education)
• Young people who are not involved in civic participation.
The ‘intermediaries‘ who will collaborate with these end beneficiaries are:
• Youth workers and organisations who provide services to marginalised and at risk young people
• School leaders
• Other organisations and their members who work with marginalised and at risk young people (for example civil society and community-based organisations)
The indirect beneficiaries are:
• Policy-makers
• The research community
