About the project
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of lower skilled adults and young people by exacerbating the digital divide. Strategically, the pandemic has impacted career opportunities and mental health, accelerating the imperative need to provide adults and young people with “skills to improve and adapt” in a rapidly changing environment.
To meet these challenges will require huge creativity and collaboration from education providers. But traditionally, adult education services are resource intensive, slow, top-down and lack use of digital pedagogies. However, social innovation offers a new pathway, and has been advanced intensively by the creative and cultural industries.
Recognizing the cultural sector as a place where “social, community and digital innovations take place” highlights the need to involve small scale creative actors to share and adopt the diverse innovation being developed in their environment.
For this reason, the CSI EU: Cultural Social Innovation Europe project brings together specialists in adult learning with leaders of outstanding arts and culture institutions to work together to develop social innovation projects with young adults in cultural and creative spaces to tackle current and local issues presented by the pandemic.
Main activities and outputs
- A Cultural Social Innovation Guide, which will map various best practice examples of cultural social innovation, as well as of the approaches, methods and tools used to carry out these projects.
- A Digital Transformation Toolbox, which will contain measures, tools, techniques and practical guidance for adult and youth educators wishing to incorporate social innovation activities into their teaching strategies, with a particular focus on increasing their confidence in using digital tools.
- A Cultural Social Innovation Hackathon and Guide, i.e. an intensive 1- or 2-day cultural social innovation training and an educational resource for both adult / youth educators and young adults on how to carry out / develop CSI projects.
Main target groups
The CSI EU project is for:
- Adults and young people with lower skills (especially those at risk), who need to strengthen key competences and engage more fully with society around them.
- Adult and youth educators, who need to understand the role of cultural social innovation (CSI) and increase their own proficiency in teaching it through innovative pedagogical approaches.
- Cultural and creative organisations, that need to find new and innovative ways to engage with other sectors and local communities in a strategy to become more resilient/relevant in the current time of economic uncertainty, ensuring the sustainable development of cultural and arts sectors across Europe.
Project partners
- Dungannon Enterprise Centre – UK (project leader)
- Momentum Marketing Services Limited – Ireland
- Youth Bridges Budapest – Hungary
- Inter Alia – Greece
- Consorzio MateraHub Industrie Culturali e Creative – Italy
- European E-learning Institute – Denmark
More info
If you want to learn more about the project:
- Visit the CSI EU website;
- Follow CSI EU on Facebook and Instagram;
- Contact Veroniki Krikoni by emailing krikoni@interaliaproject.com and/or Revekka Kefalea by emailing kefalea@interaliaproject.com.
CSI EU: Cultural Social Innovation Europe is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union – KA2: Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices – KA227: Partnerships for Creativity.
