Omagh Enterprise Company welcomed all the Young Digital Social Innovators project partners to Omagh, Northern Ireland for the initial two-day meeting of the project. It was a highly productive meeting led by Mary, Oonagh and Nick around a topic of very significant importance, not just in the UK but across Europe.
The meeting facilitated the discussion surrounding the growing significance of the DSI phenomena within the partner region and the possibilities it holds.
Young Digital Social Innovators aims to empower young people to become confident social innovators making the most of digital technology available to them. To do so, we will modernise youth work curricula and practice so that digital social innovation (DSI) can be taught to a high standard across a wide range of youth-serving organisations.
In order to achieve this objective, we will:
IO1) Increase awareness, understanding and commitment to YDSI in the youth sector by evidencing its contribution to empowerment, integration and competence development via the development and dissemination of an “All-you-need-to-know” Guide to Digital Social Innovation for Young People.
IO2) Strengthen the capacity of youth-serving organisations to teach YDSI by boosting educators’ knowledge and providing easy-to-use tools. The Young Digital Social Innovators’ Toolkit will guide youth educators through useful tools/apps for social innovation, highlighting their specific strengths and appropriate pedagogic strategies.
IO3)The Young Digital Social Innovators’ Framework & OERs (IO3) will provide an integrated set of resources for introducing DSI activities into youth programmes in the short term.
The needs explained above refer specifically to the following target groups, who will be addressed in the project:
Youth serving- organisations, Youth educators and workers.
Youth and Education stakeholders.
The kick off meeting was a great way to set the tone for how the project will hopefully continue to progress over the next 2 years!
