The CONTINUE Project is continuing apace and the partners across Europe have recently completed a series of interviews with stakeholders, both local and pan-European.

The stakeholder groups were made up of decision-makers and policy-makers whose roles include and interest in or effect on young people e.g. local politicians, educators, health and social care workers, youth workers etc. The interviews were designed to get feedback from stakeholders on the project’s findings so far, as well as garner their insights on what they perceive to be the issues affecting young people in the wake of the pandemic.

Interestingly, and gratifyingly, the insights of the stakeholders largely align with the project’s recent findings. You can read the local synthesis reports here, and the pan-European synthesis report here. Both reports are in note form as they are being used to plan our series of knowledge exchange events across Europe.

The UK’s knowledge exchange will take place at Gorse Hill Studios on Wednesday 21st September 2022 at 4.30pm. Anyone can attend, from young people to stakeholders and members of the community. You’ll discuss the findings of the project so far and your discussions will inform the policy recommendations that we will be putting forward in the next stage of the project. You can register for the event here.

You may also wish to save the date for our pan-European knowledge exchange, which will be held online on Monday 14th November 2022. Time and registration link to follow.

Over the past three years, we’ve been working with community and learning organisations across Europe as part of the CONCRIT project to explore critical thinking, storytelling and digital literacy in informal learning environments. As part of this work, we’ve produce a toolkit that provides a learning path to support trainers/informal educators to embed media literacies and digital skills in their training and community learning programmes.

The core modules in this toolkit are:

• Introduction To Media Literacy and Digital Storytelling in Civic Education
• Developing Digital Skills and Using Digital Tools
• Identifying Specific Media Literacies and Digital Storytelling Needs in Different Communities
• Safe and Responsible Practice

These four easy-to-use modules give accessible explanations and practical tasks to guide you through the different facets of media literacy and digital storytelling. Take a look and see how you can use the activities in your own work!

Over the past year People’s Voice Media has been working with a consortium of European partners on the CONTINUE Project. Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, the project has set out to gather the stories of young people across Europe, specifically relating to their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Initially, PVM trained the project partners in Community Reporter methodologies so that they (along with us) could host story gathering workshops followed by story curation sessions with marginalised young people in our respective localities in order to garner insights from their lived experience stories. These insights were collated and put together in a series of reports, one for each partner in Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and the UK. The individual insight reports (in English) can be downloaded here.

These reports were used as the backbone of a series of Conversation of Change events across Europe, one for each partner organisation. At these events, facilitated by the young people themselves, young people and project partners met with stakeholders, decision-makers and policy-makers to discuss the insights from the lived experience stories and begin to co-create ideas for social actions that would feed into the next stages of the project. The stories and events uncovered that there were three main areas in which European youth felt most heavily affected by the pandemic:

1. Health and wellbeing – high levels of anxiety, poor mental health, reduction in physical health;
2. Education and careers – disengagement with education, damaged career prospects;
3. Social issues and inequalities – exacerbation of existing inequalities and social issues.

These three themes were discussed in-depth in the Pan-European Conversation of Change event, held online in April, at which stakeholders, decision-makers, and policy-makers working at the European level worked together to develop further insights and ideas for social actions. These insights have been used to create a pan-European insight report, which can be downloaded here, and a short film highlighting some of the lived experience stories told by the young people across the continent.

The project is now moving on to its next stages, in which the young people co-create social actions in each of the respective partner countries, while partners speak to local and European level decision-makers, policy-makers and stakeholders to develop knowledge exchange events and policy recommendations. Watch this space.

Last week members of the PVM team ventured out to Valladolid to take part in a series of training workshops as part of the Narrative of Impact Project.

We were joined by project partners from across Europe and together we tested a series of storytelling activities, each of which had been adapted in order to be used as a way of measuring impact. These activities, alongside a series of video guides, will combine to form a toolkit – which will provide instructions on how to implement storytelling as a tool for measuring impact.

A huge thank you goes out to INTRAS Foundation (Spain) for hosting the training and the rest of the partners for your efforts in presenting and testing the activities: Comparative Research Network (Germany), Coordinamento delle Organizzazioni per il Servizio Volontario (Italy) and SNDE (Poland).

Stay tuned for more updates!

The second newsletter to be published as part of the CONTINUE project is available now!

See below for the full PDF which contains updates on the local Conversation of Change events and the youth training in Vilnius. If you’d like to view the stories which have been gathered so far as part of the project, you can do so on the ICR website here.

The European COC event took place on Thursday the 7th of April and saw partners and young people come together online to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s lives on a pan-European scale. Stay tuned to our blog for updates on the learning that emerged from this event and future project activities – you can also visit the CONTINUE Project website here for more information.