The end of our journey in the realm of digital youth work, safety, and wellbeing is just the beginning of new experiences.
Our joint work with our partners from the AlwaysON for Youth Project Consortium brought about incredible insights and tools to share across our movement and beyond.
- “Shaping Digital Inclusion & Safety in a Post Pandemic World” Research,
- “Digital Inclusion & Safety in Youth Work” MOOC Course, and a
- Gamification Pack.
Our recent findings highlight the critical role of digital youth work, especially during the pandemic. Based on our key findings and intellectual outputs, we are suggesting the following 3 steps for organisations, youth workers and policy-makers interested in exploring the digital youthwork wave:
1. Recognize Digital Youth Work
Combining formal education with digital youth work for a well-rounded approach. Enable resources to support both, acknowledging the significance of online engagement for young people.
2. Standards for Digital Wellbeing
Collaborate with NGOs to establish standards ensuring online safety, mental health support, and inclusivity in digital platforms used for youth work.
3. Creation of Digital Youth Work Hubs
Invest in hubs equipped with resources for effective digital youth work. Conduct a needs assessment with NGOs to tailor these hubs to community requirements.
One of the main takeaways of establishing a digital platform for youth workers is the understanding of their wants and needs. In other words, one must build a community to establish a hub for innovation. One of the core aspects of the project revolved around bringing together 30 youth workers from across Europe, offering them the opportunity to explore the tools and test the platform first-hand and thus lay the base for a grounded community.
In our journey of creating intellectual outputs, we valued the key elements in building a platform and engaging with communities and we highlighted a few benefits – relevant to everyone getting acquainted with our platform: -
Interactive Spaces: Connect with youth through real-time chats, forums, and collaborative zones—ideal for both individuals and groups.
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Content Sharing: Empower creativity by sharing multimedia content, fostering engagement and knowledge exchange.
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Small Group Power: Boost teamwork with private discussions and project-focused spaces, promoting meaningful connections.
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Safety & Privacy: Our robust well-being and safety policies encourage healthy online habits and protect user data, with resources to tackle online risks.
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Youth Worker Discounts: We value youth workers’ contributions! Enjoy special discounts to access our platform and nurture vital skills in youth.
The Key findings of our research has been well received at the Launch of the “European Digital Youth Work Toolkit: A Comprehensive Guide for Youth Workers and Educators”. The launch was presented in Brussels, Belgium on April 26th, at Zweig Visitors Centre of the European Parliament. An event that marked the success of our active cooperation and dissemination of our 2 years research, intellectual output development. The goal was to create a solid framework of resources for digital youthwork specialists, policy makers, and key innovators in the field of digital youth work.
