Draw Your Thoughts
Graphic facilitation and storytelling to improve young people’s creative and intercultural skills.
Project period: december 2019 – february 2023
Coordinator: Centro per lo Sviluppo Danilo Dolci
Partners of the project: Pistes Solidaires (France),Commune de Pikine Nord (Senegal), Resources Hub for Development (Kenya), New Hope Wave (Zambia).
Website: https://drawyourthoughts.eu
The context:
In an ever-changing world and labor market, it is becoming essential to equip young people – especially those with fewer opportunities – with the tools and skills to express themselves, become more competitive, and increase their employability.
As indicated in the EU’s youth strategy for the period 2019-2027, and in a resolution of the Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council published in November 2018, the competences and skills acquired through non-formal learning, in particular through youth work, will play a decisive role in the active engagement of young people. It therefore seems necessary to train youth workers in innovative and non-formal working methods that can both facilitate interaction with young people and equip young people themselves with useful resources for their future.
The objectives:
Draw your Thoughts aims at enhancing professional and social skills of youth workers, and at leading to an improvement of the youth sector as well as social inclusion and empowerment of youngsters with fewer opportunities. This is achieved thanks to the use of creative methods such as Graphic Facilitation and Storytelling in local workshops, complemented with international mobility for the development of intercultural awareness of youth workers and youngsters, and the final outputs of the project.
Creativity and non-formal activities are the tools for focusing on the methods of Storytelling and Graphic Facilitation in community context and in working with youngsters, leading to the development of a final awareness-raising campaign by the participants involved.
The results:
Draw your thoughts has led to the creation of educational resources for youth workers, as well as workshops with young people and job shadowing experiences:
– Desk and Field Research on the Use of Storytelling and Graphic Facilitation with Visual vocabularies from each partner country. The Desk research was conducted in the field of social issues and enriched by interviews with experienced educators and trainers.
-After the creation of the visual vocabularies, partners met in the framework of an International Training course. Participants had the chance to share the research findings and to analyze peculiarities and similarities. They were trained in the use of Storytelling with Graphic facilitation for the creation of a visual “Draw your Thoughts database”.
-Based on the content of the Training Course, each partner organized 6 workshops focused on one side on the personal development of local youngsters, fostered through the method of Storytelling and Graphic facilitation; and on the other side community level activities were developed in the creation of the civic awareness campaign organized in synergy with local youngsters. Several young people came together to work on the project workshops! Read about their experiences in the project’s Visual Diaries.
Each organization hosted an intercultural group composed of one representative for each organization. During their stay, the job-shadowers supported the creation of a local awareness-raising campaign, while improving their intercultural competences and understanding. Several youth workers moved between the different countries of the consortium to discover youth work!