The Comanity project, in which LLLP is a partner, aims to support the rise of a new profile in youth work related to social inclusion of marginalized youth – the Community Animateur – foresees an integrated set of actions to reach such an ambitious objective. Among these, the planned and implemented online activities and tools such as the Comanity Hub play a crucial role in guaranteeing wide access and further interaction of youth workers on social inclusion and youth matters.
The Comanity Hub is a virtual environment where learning, interaction, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing are possible. It goes together with the e-learning platform, where COMANITY training programme is currently being piloted to provide a positive, knowledge-enriching experience to its users with the possibility to read or share post, articles or multimedia resources with other youth workers in the EU. Whereas the online course of Comanity is currently being tested and therefore not accessible to the wider public (will be so very soon, towards the end of 2019), the Comanity Hub is open for anyone interested, to be searched, explored, used and enriched.
Accessible at http://comanity-hub.eu, the Hub is the place where stakeholders interested in social inclusion and empowerment for youth at the margins and in developing new skills can share their ideas about how social workers can evolve into Community Animateurs and foster youth’s engagement and empowerment in their communities. The Hub is at the same time a meeting point, where to exchange views and information and a knowledge space, where knowledge can be created and shared among the Hub members. The Hub is also the “gym” where learners of the Comanity training programme can test their skills and knowledge, by interacting with peers and sharing interesting initiatives, project ideas and content.
There are many categories available for the content that reflects the themes and issues dealt with daily by youth workers willing to empower young people at risk of exclusion by engaging them actively in their community: Youth (including concepts related to empowerment, needs and safety/security); Social work (poverty, equality and gender issues, social inclusion and exclusion); Community (belonging; impact, engagement); Competences (emotional intelligence, digital literacy and community animateur competences) and learning (educational materials, action-learning activities, experiential learning). Users of the Hub can browse the available content by key word search or by choosing a specific category, or subcategory. When uploading content, stakeholders are also asked to indicate the relevant category(ies)- ideally no more than 3 to help future search by colleagues and peer learners.
To become a member of the Hub, interested stakeholders just need to register (for free) and join their preferred space (content is offered in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Greek, and varies depending on the language used, as this in turn is related to the specific needs, challenges and problems of the countries associated to that language). Content in the Hub is mainly shared through video media. It was a conscious choice in order to make the content as entertaining as it is instructive. To this extent, the third component of the Comanity Hub is the Comanity Youtube Channel, where videos created and collected by the project are classified according to thematic playlists.
We really hope you will enjoy the sharing space and find it useful, so please visit the Comanity Hub, register, contribute and tell us what you think about it! It only takes two minutes of your time to answer to our feedback survey, thank you!
Comments