OZARA STORITVE

Project title: Raising Strong and Resilient Communities
Programme: Erasmus+, Strategic Partnerships for adult education
Co-financer of the project: National Agency in Finnland

Content of the project:
Economic and social times are changing globally as well as in Europe. Communities are in transition, and not only through migration. Citizens are obliged to become more self-sufficient. These are changes and challenges uneasily accepted and dealt with.
Successful initiatives depend on factors such as trust, sharing emotions, recognising and accepting differences. If cohesion and progress are the objectives, then storytelling delivers the tools and also creates engagement and compassion. Stories of shared values, shared plans and more equality provide the best examples for all that. The most successful narrative expressing this is democracy where everyone has a voice and a choice.
With the project ‘Raising Strong and resilient Communities’ the consortium wants to develop a set of educational tools that can be used in adult education (with a focus on non-formal adult education) focussing on active citizenship and participation. These tools are based on existing and the further expansion of developed approaches, theories and methods of storytelling.
These tools are a teacher/trainer manuals, structured courses for adult educators, and a collection of videos/audio recordings to showcase best practices and function as instruction videos.
The tools will be developed around the development of competences of cooperation and communication within differing communities, between various ‘divides’ such as intergenerational, intercultural, etc in order for learners to actively engage in local community work.
The innovative aspect of this project is that it aims at training and facilitating community educators to work with concrete narrative methods (e.g. Participatory Narrative Inquiry, Participatory Learning in Action, Community & network Mapping), guidelines and courses to help communities coping with present AND imagined and feasible FUTURE situations.
On an individual basis that means changing the attitudes, the negative discourses of individuals and the lingering (dominating) stories of the past.
The project will thus support planning a future for communities with concrete actions taken for future-proofing, inspired and carried by a community story that will lead to participation, collaboration, and in the end to a positive change.
The most important aspect of this project will be that during the project the partners will work on concrete cases with nationally selected community workers/educators and their communities, and alongside testing our tools, we will develop effectively ‘working’ (and thus future-orientated) community stories.
That way the methods used, the manual and the courses will become education tools and starting points for educators, volunteers and (social/street) workers within diverse communities.

Website of the project

Partners:

Duration: 2014 – 2016

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