Youth-led Societal Innovation for Resilience

The underlying aim of the ySI4R project was to develop a practical instrument to turn the frustration of youth about indecisive leadership on climate change and other ecological and social challenges to the empowerment and enthusiasm for constructive change with active participation of young people in the society. Innovative and experiential youth worker education was seen as a leverage point for such change thus the project aimed to develop a training course of methods and tools integrating the best practice examples of youth-led transition actions. Throughout the two-year project the team of organisations working with youth education from seven European countries developed a large set of experiential activities serving that aim and collected into a course for youth workers, in a form of an open and joyful online toolbox based on gamified activities, storytelling and interactive workshops. The online toolbox, named Bridgedale360, equips youth workers with a diverse variety of engaging activities and storyfied knowledge which is flexible and can be combined into practical and experiential courses empowering youth for sustainable livelihood, resilient local solutions, leadership and active citizenship. The course serves in a way that it can be adapted to the context of a particular youth work. Bridgedale360 is available at www.bridgedale360.org and the information can be found at www.bridgedale360.info. The project aimed that 1 year after launching the platform, it will have 1000 users. Currently, 4 months after the official launch, Bridgedale360 has 800 registered users and dissemination activities are still in process. The ySI4R project brought together a diverse range of organisations from Sweden, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, Macedonia, Italy and the UK represented by community training centres, youth NGOs which work with marginalised youth, and national and international networks of sustainable communities with consultative status to the UN and the EU. In order to gather the diverse youth workers experiences from around Europe and combine them into a creative course, the project team, besides intense collaborative online work, led two international 5-day workshops, 2 week-long teaching mobilities, 6 long-term youth worker mobilities and three 4-days project meetings. The final product, the course, with its core translated to seven European languages, is a great open resource for youth workers around the continent to light up in young people the holistic comprehension of the sustainability and to engage youth in active and responsible citizenship.