New Youth Exchange Opportunity: St'ART

Following up on the findings of research on "Stimulating Youth Entrepreneurship: Barriers and Incentives to Enterprise Start-ups by Young People"  and the 2013 report on the Global State of Youth Entrepreneurship , there is a growing variety of awareness and promotion programmes (in formal as well as non-formal education) facilitating the development of youth entrepreneurship. The driving force behind these initiatives is the strong hope and expectation that the programmes will contribute to the creation of youth employment opportunities by supporting entrepreneurship training specifically geared towards young people. All this against the backdrop of weak economic recovery and escalating youth unemployment.

Becoming an owner of a small enterprise can be an alternative career choice for young people who have an entrepreneurial mindset and also possess the skills, knowledge and confidence to become a successful young start-up.  This is the issue that the upcoming ST’ART youth exchange programme intends to address.

The ST’ART project is a 7 days youth exchange programme to be held in Caltanisetta, Sicily (Italy) next month and will involve 42 young people from a diversity of EU countries, such as Italy, Lithuania, Romania, The Netherlands, Latvia, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The thematic focus is on traditions in the field of art and culture and thus the programme will entail an exploration of the possibilities to develop entrepreneurial initiatives in this field. The exchange programme will offer a creative space for intercultural dialogue among the participants in order to experiment together how arts education and artistic expression can be effective in empowering young people and engage them in active citizenship around heritage issues.

These are the three major objectives for the youth exchange:

• To share different experiences and practices in the field of art & culture among young people from different cultural contexts and backgrounds in the EU.
• To raise awareness among young people of the potential of artistic and cultural traditions as a catalyst for inclusive and sustainable growth.
• To foster international entrepreneurial initiatives focused on the heritage value of traditions in the field of art and culture.

The project leadership is in the hands of the Italian organisation  PRISM-Promozione Internazionale Sicilia-Mondo, who initiated this exchange week and involved the following partners: Sirvintu Meno Mokykla (LT) , Fundatia ACTIVITY (RO), JASMA (LV), Association "Professional Forum for Education" (BG) , SAM, Republic of Macedonia (MK) and our School of Social Work at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (NL).

By joining this initiative we have paved the way for a small delegation of young people from our social work department to participate in this intercultural and international adventure. They will be joined by our staff member Marianne Lindhout who will also take an active part in the programme by leading a number of activities in the programme.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained there.

How to organise stimulating study visits abroad

Recently a blog on the URBACT site gave away the secrets to do just that. From the many European projects that they have run, thematic pole manager Ivan Tosics drew up a blog post to inspire others. Creating opportunities to interact with each other and the hosts, involving all participants, stimulating discussions and initiatives: these are just some of the tips.

Study visits come in all shapes and sizes, with most visits lasting 3 to 5 days and with groups that vary in size from 10 to 15 to 25 people. Many study visits (or study trips or study tours for that matter) amount to a factfinding mission, but it can be so much more than that.

International study visits broaden our horizons, challenge our understanding of ourselves, and help us understand those whose cultures are different from our own. As such they are an invaluable tool in internationalisation. Often visitors prepare themselves by researching the topic of interest in their own country and reviewing their own practice before the actual visit takes place.

Ideally these study visits consist of three components, namely academic, cultural and social exchange. Here are some of the objectives of the majority of study visits: to learn on common themes of interest, to develop mutual understanding, to provide opportunity to reflect and discuss (innovative) practices elsewhere and/or to provide opportunities for networking.
For students' learning the aim is often to compare and to contrast (and sometimes to benchmark). 

A familiar approach to attain these goals is to have site visits to NGOs and other organisations and / or to provide a mixture of expert inputs and discussion.

With the following tips you can take the design and the organisation of a study visit to the next level and provide a positive, enriching and lasting experience.

Here are the 6 "golden nuggets" that are listed in the blog post that was mentioned above:

1. Increase Innovation Potential With Unusual Circumstances

2. Involve Participants In Collective, Playful Actions

3. Organise Dynamic Presentations Of Interesting Practices

4. Ask Partners To Identify Innovative Small Case Practices

5. Make Space For Two-way Knowledge Transfer With The Hosts Of Study Visits

6. Make Room For Micro-consulting: ask international visitors to act as experts, giving advice on questions of interests to the hosts

Especially, this last tip is definitely an interesting one from an international perspective. For it requires visitors to put themselves in the shoes of the hosts and to relate the topics to the contexts they are familiar with at home. This thinking exercise is bound to produce some incredibly creative ideas that can inspire the hosts to regard the issue at hand in another light and harvest multiple perspectives and solutions from a diverse audience. 

Elsewhere on this blog City as Text was mentioned as an innovative method to uncover and discover urban areas off the beaten track in a surprising manner. The CaT pedagogy emphasizes the strength of experiential or active learning by inviting  participants to "read a city as a text" by having a walkabout through urban districts and debriefing sessions to follow up. This CaT method incorporates a number of these golden nuggets turning a study visit into a successful and stimulating experience. 

LBTG - Let's Bridge the Gap , a YiA project !

Here's the video that was produced as the final outcome of the Youth in Action project that took place in Palermo, Italy on the topic of LBTG and was organised as a training course by CESIE in June, 2013, with the support of the action 3.1 of the Youth in Action programme.

I'm sure you'll notice the enthusiasm and inspiration that every participant put into the sessions, workshops and events. As such it's an interesting visualisation of a week's activities and demonstrates a YiA project in a nutshell: for 9 days, 42 youth workers from 15 different countries (Italy, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Netherlands, Ukraine) discussed issues and expressed their points of view on sexuality, discrimination, stereotypes and issues related to the LGBTIQ community(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Intersexual, Queer).

Moreover , the project was implemented at the same time as National Pride, to which participants contributed with different performances at the Pride Village, a flash-mob in the heart of Palermo, and their participation to the Parade with their own truck.
Have a look for yourself !

Memento project: an interesting idea

How to make international students feel at ease in a foreign country ? Many universities try to do their best and find their own ways and solutions to make the transition as easy as possible. Since a couple of years a new annual award was launched by NUFFIC to stimulate universities to make students really feel welcome and at home in their host country.
This year's Orange Carpet Award went to ArtEZ, Institute of Arts in Enschede, for their successful project called Memento.
The idea of this project is based on a quotation by the author Mark Twain:
“I'm grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”
The concept of MEMENTO involves the visualization of recollections (memories) and their presentation in a joint exhibition.
The supervisory instructors of the exchange programme stimulated the students the past months to share their personal memories with fellow students from different cultures. To what extent are there important differences in the process of recollecting? Are there also similarities? And are these similarities universal or are they determined by specific locations and/or cultures? All these memories can be related to images, music, film, photos, smells and/or stories.
I feel this is indeed an excellent way to have students work together on a collective assignment during their exchange programme.
Here's a link to some more information about this intriguing project and good practice. You can also check out their blog.
This could also be an idea to work out further for our own international course, even though we do not have any arts students.

creativity and innovation

Those were the terms that triggered me and set me off to Brussels for a 2-day conference organised by the EU. And what an inspiring 2 days it became!
It was the first time I saw Ján Figel' speak, EU commissioner for education, culture, training and youth. I had read some of his speeches before, but seeing him "live" made me realise how this man really tried to make an impact on the audience by actually speaking to a huge gathering instead of just reading out a text prepared in advance, as did the second speaker Luc Van den Brande, President of the Committee of Regions and Odile Quentin, Director General EAC, in her closing speech. What also struck me was that he stressed the fact that it was all about "making human life more human", his captivating speech was a real message to the listeners and came across as authentic.
I was quite happy about the choice I had made for the session on the crucial role of schools in innovation and fostering creativity. The key issue of new skills needed for new jobs was highlighted and the audience was presented with creative answers to the key question of what to teach in schools to prepare the young generation for these new jobs.
The next day I had decided to go to the session of social innovation to hear a number of fascinating examples of societal entrepreneurship. Turning something seemingly bad into something good, was what all the speakers drove. Budapest Beyond Sightseeing for example is a case in point: it's a different type of city tour that takes the participants to one of the most neglected districts of Budapest where they get to experience the area’s hidden treasures through active participation, stories and encounters with locals, aiming to change the perception of the neighbourhood and its residents. The two people in charge of these social cultural walking tours both come from a social work background.
The conference ended with the rapporteurs summarising the policy conclusions from each of the theme sessions, here's the link to the report.
And here are some of the pictures I took to get a flavour of the whole event.