Innovation Express – Job Shadowing

Innovation Express – Job Shadowing

Fundatia Danis and Norsensus Mediaforum (Norway)  have been working for several years with young people, developing expertise, at local, national and European level, in supporting young people to develop personally and professionally, to be more active in the community, to make their voice heard, but also to start and run their social, business or volunteer initiatives. Following our common goal to improve our work with young people, we organized the Innovation Express – a job shadowing project, which allowed us to learn, share and initiate new activities and services that develop young people’s sense of initiative, digital and future work skills and their capacity to participate more in their communities.

The project aimed to professionalize the organizations’ youth workers with the following specific objectives in mind:

• Equip youth workers with competences to support young people to put their social initiatives into practice and reinvent their communities, while gaining a powerful voice in these communities;
• Provide youth workers with competences and innovative educational methods for supporting young people to better adapt to the fast changing labour market;
• Support youth workers and their organizations to diversify their funding sources, develop or improve membership systems, better involve their stakeholders and provide more user-centered services for young people;
• Develop youth workers’ digital competences and equip them with knowledge and skills necessary to use digital educational tools for young people.

The project included two job shadowing activities in which two youth workers from the partner organizations were involved with the aim of professional development and organizational growth for innovative youth work. The job shadow activities included learning objectives and specific activities, grouped in the following development areas:

• Enhance youth employability and develop digital skills of young people;
• Develop young people’s sense of initiative;
• Support young people for better inclusion and expression of opinions in the community;
• Increase capacity building of the organizations.

For each of these growth directions, the two partners identified methods, tools, expertise and experience from current or previous local or national projects, focused on the above topics, which were shared and which inspired the partners’ youth workers involved in the job shadowing activities.

Thus, at the beginning of August 2019, Vedat Sevincer (Norsensus Mediaforum) has visited Fundatia Danis for 10 days of learning and sharing from our entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship education and internship projects, but also from local partnerships we have with universities, student unions, NGOs and companies. Then, in the second part of August 2019, our colleague – Paula Beudean – spent 12 days with Norsensus Mediaforum learning from our partner’s experience in media literacy and storytelling for young people and youth organizations, and from their local partnerships with NGOs, schools, grass-root organizations, etc. Together, during this one-month exchange, we developed and delivered a workshop on Design Thinking and Storytelling for NGO Workers, and planned new projects on media literacy, social entrepreneurship, storytelling and design thinking that will be implemented during 2020-2022.

Innovation Express was co-funded by European Commission, through Erasmus+ Programme and Norwegian National Agency – Aktiv Ungdom.