Youth Power has organized 3rd Great Minds Meeting within the “Digitalisation and innovation of Youth work methodology for inclusion of immigrants” project that took place in Berlin on June 9, 2022. One of the main goals of this conference was to inspire and to exchange practices and experiences, networking and finding solutions on how to youth workers can use digitalisation in innovative way in order to increase attractiveness of the youth work activities and make them up-to-date for better impact on inclusion and engagement of both mainstream and marginalised, immigrant youngsters.
First part of the conference was introduction of whole project and project partners. Later Intellectual outputs of this project were presented and first part was concluded with the discussion, comments and ideas of participants on this project. Follow-up activity was panel discussion where our Youth Power members talked about current active projects, Erasmus+ programme and their experiences related to youth work. Our CEO Armin Cerkez had chance to open this panel discussion and he talked about challenges that he had in youth work and how much COVID-19 affected our work. Nedim Micijevic, program manager of Youth Power, explained to participants more about our new E-learning platform for youngsters and youth workers that we are currently running with various different topics. online courses are free, interactive and helpful to everyone who wants to improve their knowledge related to youth work. Franjo Brkan, Executive Director of Youth Power Germany, talked about Youth Power’s contribution to the people in Ukraine who are affected by war. Panel discussion was concluded with Amar Hamzic, project manager of Youth Power, and his speech about his EVS experience in Croatia and Estonia. He talked about his path since early days in youth work and how he advanced and today he is proud Youth Power member.
After panel discussion we did workshop with CSOs and youth workers on how to use the Intellectual outputs and whole conference was concluded with “Escape room” titled “Aliens want to know what migration is”. “Aliens want to know what migration is” is a simple and quick escape room game aimed atunderstanding some basic terms related to migration and providing fun and exciting learning experience for young people.
Project “Digitalisation and innovation of Youth work methodology for inclusion of immigrants” responds to the needs of our youngsters (mainstream and marginalised) and youth
workers, as well as is in line with the latest findings at European level that there is a need for
innovative youth work approach towards youngsters that spend a lot of their time online and do
not visit (local) youth centres/clubs so often, any more. With this project, we aim at further
empowering our youth workers in innovative usage of digitalisation, online youth work and
gamification methodology in regular work with youngsters (incl. immigrants) in our communities,
in order to increase attractiveness of the youth work activities and make them up-to-date for
better impact on inclusion and engagement of both mainstream and marginalised, immigrant
youngsters. This is 3rd time that Youth Power is organising Great Minds Meeting conference and more similar activities are excepted in near future. Second conference was held in Berlin last year in November and the first one back in 2019 in Mostar.
