Colourful Hands

Objectives

By implementing this project, we aimed to enhance the competences of youth workers in graphic facilitation, visual thinking, and digital visual tools. As a result, we provided space for youth workers to develop skills that boosted their motivation and willingness to self-develop professionally and use innovative tools and methods to make their activities more accessible and attractive for the youngsters they worked with on a daily basis.

More specifically, the objectives we sought to achieve through this project were the following – we wanted the youth workers involved in the project to:

• Develop their theoretical and practical competences in graphic facilitation and digital tools;
• Discover the power of visual creativity in youth work, both as a method and as a goal in itself;
• Learn about visual support in the learning process, especially with respect to accessibility and learning styles;
• Become more self-confident in graphic facilitation and creativity.

The project directly addressed the needs expressed by the partner organisations, who were looking for ways to improve the quality of the activities implemented by the youth workers involved and engage more youngsters in their work. Additionally, the organisations aimed to implement new, innovative tools with which they were not sufficiently familiar and to share their experience in youth work with other partners, in order to create international cooperation initiatives.

Activities

The project’s main activity was a Training Course (Professional Development Activity) of 7 working days, during which participants learned about and practised graphic facilitation from various perspectives. This included sessions on visual thinking, the essentials of graphic facilitation, icons and visual dictionaries, graphic recording, and digital visual tools. All activities were facilitated by trainers who guided participants, step by step, towards achieving the project results, i.e., enhancing their competences in graphic facilitation and creativity as applied in youth work.

We included 21 participants, including at least one-third with fewer opportunities, from 7 European countries (Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Poland, Serbia, and Spain). They were all youth workers active in the field, capable of taking an active part in the preparation, implementation, and dissemination of the project, and involved in activities conducted by the partner organisations. They were aged 18+ and had little to no experience in graphic facilitation but were motivated to enhance their competences in visual thinking, creativity, and graphic facilitation, both through traditional and digital methods. All participants had at least an intermediate level of English to fully participate in the project.

Impact

We expected that the implementation of this project would have a beneficial impact on both its participants and the organisations involved. We aimed to enhance the competences of the youth workers in the topics of the project (graphic facilitation, visual thinking, digital visual tools, visual accessibility) as well as in other areas, such as foreign language practice, multicultural dialogue, cooperation, and networking skills. They also became familiar with new methods and tools, including graphic facilitation and non-formal education, which they could later use in their home organisations.

As a result, thanks to the dissemination activities planned within this project, the partner organisations ended up with staff more competent and motivated to use innovative methods that helped them reach more youngsters and develop local projects that were more appealing and accessible to youth from different backgrounds and opportunities.

Moreover, through the partner organisations’ use of the newly acquired competences and methods, graphic facilitation and creativity became more well-known in the community of European youth workers, thereby increasing the quality of youth work across different regions of Europe.

Finally, thanks to the opportunity to connect and exchange with other youth workers, there was more international and intersectional cooperation between the organisations and individuals involved, leading to the emergence of new, high-quality projects.