IYE-LABS

Improving young people’s skills for civic participation & volunteering.

visit the official website of the project

Overview

The IYE-LABs project faces the challenge of reaching a group of young people between 18 and 30 years, who have a social purpose and want to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to undertake volunteer projects.

The project will especially involve “harder to reach” groups: young people with disadvantage backgrounds, migrants, NEETs… in order to apply social inclusion principles from the project roots.

IYE-LABs will foster inclusive youth environments by implementing innovative and participative practices, through developing social labs model as non-formal learning activities addressed to improving young people’s skills for civic participation and volunteering. Developing the role of volunteering for social inclusion is the cornerstone of our project, generating a leadership changing forever participants’ lives and the social ecosystem of their cities.

Tools for the design and co-creation of projects (Canvas, Problem Trees…), outreach campaigns and participatory techniques are also other methodologies we will use to implement for social change. The project is inspired by the success of the Córdoba Social Lab good practice, ongoing since 2014.

IYE-LABS is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Why this project?

The IYELABs project has been designed to tackle the following issues:

Lack of civil participation attitude among young people.
Lack of youth involvement in local community and third sector organisations.
Inequality and poverty, exclusion and discrimination that affects young people from disadvantage groups.

The main objective of IYE-LABS is to contribute increasing social, civic and intercultural skills and critical thinking of young people by developing the role of volunteering through their engagement in social inclusion projects.

IYE-LABs’ specific objectives are:

To promote intercultural dialogue and positive benefits of a diverse society among the project beneficiaries and the European society in general.
To enhance critical thinking and media literacy among young people and youth workers.
To foster active citizenship at a local and global level within a group of traditionally passive and unemployed youth by improving their skills for adopting the role of volunteers for social inclusion.
To build synergies with the local communities and enhance the capacity of youth work and social organizations to act as inclusion agents by empowering young people to drive positive changes in their communities.