“ALL IN” is the name of a newborn Strategic Partnership Project (KA2) about inclusion, financed by Erasmus+, which involves 8 partner organizations from Austria (which is also the coordinator), Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, UK, Slovenia and Spain. The kick-off meeting took place in Graz, Austria, from the 21st of May to the 24th during which all the partners had the opportunity to meet and to get to know each other in person after a simple e-mail communication.
The point of the meeting was mainly to introduce the project, to share ideas and opinions on what we all thought about inclusion and to define the responsibilities among the partners. It is always a pleasure to meet and talk face to face with the partners with whom you will work for two years: you need to build trust and create a common ground from which you can start to work together.
All the partner organizations work in different fields of youth work in which there’s anyway a real need to foster inclusion. Nowadays the term inclusion is used by many people and has become a very fashionable concept. But what is actually inclusion? What do we mean by that? This is the starting point of the project: the intention is to fill the gap in the actual understanding of inclusion (include from where, into what and including whom), and to give as a consequence practical skills and support to youth workers in order to implement the concept into reality and to make their work more inclusive.
For this reason, the goal of the project is to develop and test training modules about inclusive approach to all in youth work. Each organization has the duty to create a module with the support materials aimed at training actual or future leaders, youth workers and all the person working with young people in general. In order to create really inclusive modules, field research is the starting point: each partner has to understand what are the standards nowadays as regards inclusion in its own country, in order to work in the right direction. The training module is seen here as “innovation, because it will be create in the way that it can reach different target groups within youth field”, as the coordinators say. The modules will consists, in fact, of several blocks and people will be able to choose and to attend what is necessary for them.
All the modules created will be tested and collected in a training manual which will be used to train a pool of youth workers to inclusiveness. What the creators of the project would like to achieve is that this could become a certain standard in the education of people involved in youth work. Of course, it’s just the beginning of the project and there’s a lot of work ahead. The atmosphere of the meeting was anyway very positive: the group left Graz with a lot of ideas and good intentions, a schedule to follow, and the plan to meet again in Scotland next November to report the first results. As Vicolocorto we are very proud to be part of this process… let’s make youth work more inclusive!
Virginia
Vicolocortini 