By Andrea Rodriguez, Ripess Europe

(Image by Beehive community)

The YITEG project –Youth Impacting Transformative Economies through Game-design– aims to initiate a participatory and empowering process oriented to action-learning in which groups of young people already active in SSE map the practices of Transformative Economies (TEs) and co-design pedagogical tools, which translate into a game about TEs and a manual. All these activities will be accompanied by training moments and awareness campaigns to involve other young people who have not yet approached the world of SSE. This process enables young people to acquire skills, establish community links at local and European level and engage – as agents of change – in promoting common values and practices of Transformative Economies.

This Erasmus + project, which lasts two years, has a very rich and diverse membership, which is also a way to strengthen relationships, exchange good practices and weave links at European level with the aim of making transformative practices and Social and Solidarity Economy more visible towards a world that advocates social justice.

Specifically, this project is coordinated by NEXES (Spain), a social entity whose objective is to develop youth mobility and cooperation projects and which tries to interconnect the local reality with the global one. Also participate in the project NINFEA (Italy), “National Informal and Non formal Education Associations”, an organization that aims to promote the work of youth professionals (including educators and animators), IDEALUDICA (Spain), which has been designing games for leisure, training, education and social communication sectors for more than 11 years. BEEHIVE (Greece), a cooperative that offers educational opportunities with the aim of helping different groups to actively participate in social movements and social justice actions. On the French side we have two organizations involved in the project: KALEIDO’SCOOP, a cooperative that promotes active participation at all levels of society, especially at the level of public policies, cultural diversity and international mobility. And the UNIVERSITY OF SAINT ETIENNE, which has been involved through the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences and specifically through the department of “Social and solidarity economy and social innovation”, which is truly relevant to this project. Finally, we have RIPESS EUROPA, the European SSE network that will give a broad vision at European level and will allow us to weave other alliances worldwide.

To summarize, the main activities that we will develop throughout these two years in the YITEG project are:

  • The creation, accompaniment and training of four local youth groups and a youth support and counselling group in the field of TEs
  • The creation and sharing of multimedia community maps on TEs
  • A transnational training in game design
  • The creation of an educational game on TEs and the development of a manual on how to enhance the impact of the game
  • A learning seminar on community engagement and social impact through TEs outcomes.

We are happy to announce this new cooperation project that will promote youth participation and the development of Transformative Economies through new techniques of generating knowledge such as game design theory.

Soon we will publish more news about the project so that you can keep an exhaustive follow-up of our activities and exchange new ideas with us.