Digital storytelling for youth mental health

Digital Storytelling for Youth Mental Health will empower young people with new skills to manage the negative impacts and challenges of the 21st century. Young people nowadays face multiple challenges: social inequalities are rising; social mobility is decreasing in most of the European countries; the labour market requires new skills and public education cannot always keep up with these needs; while environmental sustainability is becoming a more and more burning issue that may soon affect our everyday life. It is not surprising that feelings of anxiety, helplessness, loss of personal integrity are more and more common problems among young people in Europe made even worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We aim to use a digital storytelling approach to raise awareness and empower young people to cope with challenges and mental health issues, supporting them in building resilience among peers in their communities. For this, we need to equip youth workers with modern communication and development tools.

Objectives

to develop competences of youth workers in using digital storytelling as a capacity-building tool, providing them with guidance and support while applying it.
to provide youth workers with educational resources, methods, and tools to empower local young people in a digital environment.
to provide young people with opportunities to share their experiences during the pandemic with their peers and to learn from these experiences in a positive way.
to enable young people to access information material on mental health; addressing the challenges young people face and offering solutions on how to deal with those challenges.
to guide and support young people in designing and delivering awareness campaigns, in empowering their peers, and leading the reactions to challenges of our age.
to equip young people with new creative skills to enable them to express their feelings creatively, via short hands - on online tutorials in various art forms such as digital arts, digital music, design, photography, tools which complement and enhance digital storytelling.

Through applying digital storytelling, featuring first-person stories at the country and local levels, the project will allow youth to share and learn from peers’ experiences. We will support young people in designing and delivering awareness campaigns and initiatives that will enable them to be actively engaged in health promotion. Youth-focused social networks initiatives will help us empower a wide range of young people to volunteer, exchange knowledge, and spread awareness. We will develop a bite-sized e-learning resource to offer young people a repository with easy access to information material on mental health addressing the challenges and offering solutions.

Youth workers in the EU face complex global challenges that require NGOs to join efforts with the creative industry to overcome this challenge. As this consortium aspires to analyse resources from all the listed countries and create complex educational material easily transferable to any EU country, the project is inherently transnational.