Digital Youth Work means using and/or addressing digital media and technology in youth work practice. This can be as a tool, an activity and/or as content.
The Project
The Digital Youth Work Project aims to build capacity to deliver digital youth work at local, national, regional and European levels. It is a transnational Erasmus+ funded project with seven partners from six different countries across Europe and it is implemented during 2017-2019.
The project partners are YouthLink Scotland, Centre for Digital Youth Care (Denmark), Verke– The National Digital Youth Work Centre (Finland), wienXtra MedienZentrum (Austria), JFF – Institut für Medienpädagogik(Germany), National Youth Council of Irelandand Camara Education Ireland.
The Purpose
As a partnership, we believe that quality youth work that meets young people’s needs must, in this modern era, include digital considerations. This does not mean that every youth worker should be a technical expert, but that a recognition that young people are growing up in a digital era and that they need support to navigate the online aspects of their lives and critically analyse online information and interaction is becoming increasingly central to youth work.
There is also huge potential within the youth work sector to enhance and innovate practice through the use of digital technology and media and to use non formal and informal learning to help young people to create digital content and shape the digital world of the future.
However, alongside these needs and opportunities there is also a lack of confidence, competence, strategic planning and investment to enable the youth work sector to fully embrace these developments. This project aims to increase capacity of the youth work sector to engage with these two areas by offering training, guidance and best practice sharing to practitioners and managers to help incorporate digital youth work into their planning. It also creates opportunities to raise the profile of and showcase the value of digital youth work.
The Products
This is a collection of 36 short films illustrating replicable good practice in a wide range of digital youth work from Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland and Scotland. 18 are live now, the other 18 will be launched on 3rd September 2019.
2. Digital Youth Work Training Resources
This is a collection of session plans to train practitioners, workshops that can be run with young people and planning and self-assessment tools for the development of digital youth work in your organisation and as an individual practitioner.
These guidelines are for youth workers, youth organisations, funders and policy makers - to give practical guidance around the importance and approach of the youth work sector as informal educators supporting young people to navigate the online aspects of their lives.
