Cultural Social Innovation Europe
COVID-19 has exposed the vulnerabilities of lower skilled adults and young people by exacerbating the digital divide. Strategically, the pandemic has impacted career opportunities and mental health, accelerating the imperative need to provide adults and young people with “skills to improve and adapt” in a rapidly changing environment.
To meet these challenges will require huge creativity and collaboration from education providers. But traditionally, adult education services are resource intensive, slow, top-down and lack use of digital pedagogies. However, social innovation offers a new pathway and has been advanced intensively by the creative and cultural industries. Recognizing the cultural sector as a place where “social, community and digital innovations take place” highlights the need to involve small scale creative actors to share and adopt the diverse innovation being developed in their environment.
For this reason, CSI:EU project brings together specialists in adult learning with leaders of outstanding arts and culture institutions to work together to develop social innovation projects with young adults in cultural and creative spaces to tackle current and local issues presented by the pandemic.
The objective of CSI:EU is clear: to empower adults and young people most affected by COVID to become confident cultural social innovators and design innovative (digital) solutions to challenges posed by the crisis. In so doing they will develop valuable transversal, digital and employment related skills and improve their own mental health.
Project Outputs:
Cultural Social Innovation Guide: to map various case studies of cultural social innovation in Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, and the UK, with the aim to:
raise awareness and commitment to introducing Cultural Social Innovation (CSI) into the education of adults and young people, and
to inspire and cultivate the creativity skills that are essential in the culture-based social innovation process, aided with the use of digital tools.
2. Digital Transformation Toolkit: The toolkit follows on from the in-depth research undertaken in the aforementioned guide. While the Guide to cultural social innovation is research based, the Toolkit is centred on practical guidance and tools for adult and youth educators wishing to incorporate cultural social innovation activities into their training and teaching strategies, with a particular focus on increasing their confidence in using digital tools.
CSI EU Toolbox.pdfOur toolkit is designed to teach you OUR TOP 20 TOOLS in under an hour each. It follows a simple four step process and our hope and aim is to encourage you to try one or two tools initially, gauge the impact for yourself then learn some more!
3. Cultural Social Innovation Hackaton and Guide - Intensive 1- or 2-day cultural social innovation trainings for both adult/youth educators and a Hackathon with youngsters on how to carry out/develop CSI projects. Hackathon events were held in each partner countries.
The Hackathon Guide provides guidelines on how to to implement the hackathon methodology with an emphasis on the specificities that can be found at local level in the six different countries of the CSI partnership: Italy, Greece, Ireland, Hungary, Denmark, and the UK.
Our "YBB Travel and Learn Hackathon" event was held with the participation of 15 adult educators and young people. In the event we introduced the CSI:EU project and the Hackathon concept, and different opportunities, grant schemes available for young people on how to start local or international inititatives. We gave some tips on idea generation and project development. The keynote speakers gave an eye-opening talk about their global reality project, intercultural immersion, and a new approach how to see others around us. From global realities we arrived back to localities, and got some inspiration from the local green movement.
During the workshop the teams developed new local cultural social innitatives such as debate club, a mental health awareness group project, and an idea of a camp boosting resilience and self-awareness.
Thank you for their enthusiastic participation and hard work!
Partners
Denmark
Programme: Erasmus+
Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices
Action type: Strategic Partnerships in the field of adult education
ID: 2020-1-UK01-KA227-ADU-094497
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
