Earlier this month the People’s Voice Media team attended the kick-off meeting in Berlin for our new Erasmus+ funded project – CONCRIT. The project aims to work towards a socially cohesive Europe, which requires self-confident, fully informed and educated citizens. To support this, ourselves and partners will be investigating the topics of community narration and digital literacies, exploring their role in civic education. Through this research, we will produce learner driven tools, ways to build a community and techniques to de-construct discriminatory stereotypes.

Partners involved in the project are from Poland, Germany, Italy and the UK and contribute different expertise and perspectives. People involved in the project work in participatory arts, support services for people experiencing issues such as mental ill health, civic participation fields and sports development arenas. This multidisciplinary team are seeking to pool our collective intelligence and learn from one another and wider stakeholders, in order to create training programmes and training activities pertinent to digital literacies.

We are currently in the research phase of the project, with the start of next year being focused on developing training materials and resources. The project will then move onto testing out these outputs and refining them. There’ll be opportunities for People’s Voice Media’s partners and stakeholders to get involved – so if you’re interested, let us know!

The meeting coincided with the 30 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is a timely reminder of the constant need to keep knocking down the barriers between people – whether they are physical or ideological – in order to build inclusive and welcoming communities. We’ll keep you updated on how the project progresses in its aim and contributes to this vision next year.