Youth unemployment is one of the biggest challenges our global economy is facing: in 2016, 73 million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 were unemployed, a 6% increase since 2007. In Latin America unemployed youngsters represent more than 40% of the total number of unemployed in many countries. At the same time the EU28 is also experiencing a 15.9% rate of youth unemployment (February 2018).Artistic youngsters are specifically faced with difficulties when seeking employment within their field. Unemployment in Europe among recent graduates are highest for those, who majored in arts. Statistics evidently show that film, video, drama and photography majors are least wanted on the labor market, closely followed by fine arts and commercial graduates. This is due to decreased need for distinctive competences of artists by many companies. Thereby, seemingly those who study arts, study for a hobby rather than a source of living.Based on this, the members of the consortium (United Kingdom, Denmark, Colombia and Honduras) identified the need of advancing non-formal education in the partner countries by developing non-formal methodology that can help youth workers to support young people in successfully reinforcing their artistic talents with entrepreneurship. Thus, the aim of this project is to build capacity of the partner organizations to contribute to lessening the unemployment among artistic young people through entrepreneurship.Objectives:- To develop a compendium of at least 20 methods to support artistic young people in becoming entrepreneurs.- To train youth workers how to inspire artistic young people to become entrepreneurs and be able to deliver non-formal education in the art entrepreneurship context.- To strengthen the cooperation between Latin America and Europe and share best practices upon how to combine art with entrepreneurship, in order to contribute to economic growth.The project primarily targets youth workers from the partner organizations and their network. It is expected that by the end of the project they will have the capacity to effectively support talented young people to create relevant jobs for themselves. Building competences of youth workers in arts entrepreneurship will have an indirect impact on their beneficiaries, young artists. They will be able to inspire artist to engage in entrepreneurship, thus create their own job. After starting their own business, they will be able to employ other artists, who face the same challenges, hence creating a local economic growth. The partners consider this a sustainable way of lowering unemployment locally. Lowered unemployment, and economic growth in the sector will have its impact nationally and internationally as well.

"“PoGo – Poetry on the Go” is a strategic partnership that involves five other partner organisations from Denmark, Turkey, Poland, Romania and Germany. The partners came together to contribute at fostering European identity by strengthening amongst young people a feeling of belonging to a shared European culture. The Strategic Partnership is a response to the current alarming tendencies in Europe: Brexit and its rhetoric on migration; and half of young EU citizens (15-24 years old) believing that there is no common European culture.To address their aim, the partners chose to bring classic and contemporary poetry by establish artists and young poets in the young people’s environment and in a format that attracts and engages. In this regard, the partners pinpoint the following objectives:1. By August 2021, to give 487 young people from the participating countries the opportunity to define European culture and contribute to its enrichment; 2. By December 2021, to develop a mobile application that gives young people access to European culture as defined by their fellows; 3. To foster, by the end of the project, a private-public partnership with at least 60 stakeholders in the partner countries that contributes at promoting a shared European culture.The project will involve 487 young people from the six organisations in this consortium to develop a mobile app, named “PoGo”, that uses augmented reality technology and bring European poetry to young people. The mobile app will include 78 poems from the partner countries, in their national language. The poems will be collected by the partners under four categories: “Classic or Forgotten”, “Contemporary Poetry”, “Poetry by Young People” and “Collaborative Poetry”. Young people from the partner countries will be video recorded reciting the selected national poems in the original language, thus the 78 creations will be available in video format and will incorporate poetry in English, Danish, Turkish, Romanian, Polish and German. The partners agreed on various measures to ensure the use of the app, such as agreements with local stakeholders who will create visibility for the app at their premises, agreements with associate partners, multiplier events and extensive dissemination activities, availability of the app on Android and iOS platforms. Although being targeted to the young people by its functionalities, the app has a transferable character and it can be used in the school and VET sectors as well as by adult learners. The project is partners’ small contribution to enhance European identity and a feeling of belonging to share European culture. The project is in line with the CONNECT area as stipulated in EU Youth Strategy 2019-2027 that aims to bring young people together across the EU and beyond to foster solidarity and intercultural understanding. The project relates to the New Agenda for Culture as it looks to reinforce a sense of common European identity. Nonetheless, the project develops innovative approaches for reaching young people and addressing linguistic and culture diversity, thus is in line with the objectives of the KA2 of the programme.The partnership brings stakeholders from various sector: four partner organisations from the non-governmental sector (City Arts, Interbildung, ADEPT and Semper Avanti), a social enterprise (InterCollege) and a public institution (Kocaeli Provincial Directorate of National Education). Although, the five partner organisations were involved to different extents in strategic partnership, “PoGo – Poetry on the Go"" is the first Strategic Partnership for City Arts."

The proposed research will build upon and help to sustain the work that the partner organisations have been involved in as members of the AHRC-funded regional network 'Making the Connections: arts, migration and Diaspora.' The regional network is an outgrowth of previous AHRB funded research in the East Midlands region (O'Neill and Tobolewska 2001; O'Neill 2001) and the work of 'The Long Journey Home' initiative funded by the regional arts council. These projects identified the central role of the arts and culture in facilitating processes of belonging and integration and the importance of renewing social research methodologies that generate knowledge to help us understand experiences of migration and diaspora, challenge myths and stereotypes and produce work that can feed into social and cultural policy. \n\nExploring the social role of the arts in processes of social change and the space between ethnographic, participatory research and arts based work, the partners will engage in three strands of activity taking forward the key aims of the regional network funded by the AHRC until 2008: to enhance the lives of recent arrivals in the East Midlands; to stimulate high-quality inter-disciplinary research and the production of art works; to facilitate connection, communication and feed into public policy; and to contribute to public awareness of the issues facing new arrivals.\n\nThe three strands of activity are:\n\n1) Develop an 'Artists Pool' event to launch the production of a directory of artists with experience of working with new arrivals, refugees, asylum seekers and a directory of artists in exile. This will be located on-line at www.makingtheconnections.info.\n\n2) Develop, extend and sustain the 'makingtheconnections.info' web-resource currently managed by the convenors at Loughborough University, Department of Social Sciences. The proposed KT activity will therefore develop the electronic resource in order that it will serve as a hub and repository for regional research and arts activity in the area of arts, migration and diaspora. \n\n3) Conduct a performance event that focuses upon new arrivals taking a walk with a local dignitary/member of the refugee forum from a place they call home to a special place in their city/town. The conversation will be taped and transcribed. In the course of the walk (led by the new arrivals) processes of place and home-making will be discussed. This event will be followed by a series of twelve workshops with the new arrivals and fellow walkers in each city/town that will focus upon the senses of belonging that they negotiate, working through themes of place, space and identity. This is an outgrowth of research conducted by the PI in the region (O'Neill and Tobolweska 2002a, 2002b; O'Neill and Harindranath 2006; O'Neill 2004) and the discussions partners have engaged in through regional network events. The inspiration for the walks comes from the work of Misha Myers at www.homingplace.org, and is informed by performative and cultural geographical praxis.\n\n

The Horizon institute is a multidisciplinary centre of excellence for Digital Economy (DE) research. The core mission of Horizon has been to balance the opportunities arising from the capture, analysis and use of personal data with an awareness and understanding of human and social values. The focus on personal data in a wide range of contexts has required the development of a broad set of multidisciplinary competencies allowing us to build links from foundational algorithms and system to issues of society and policy. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. Horizon now encompasses over 50 researchers, spanning Computing, Engineering, Law, Psychology, Social Sciences, Business and the Humanities. It has grown a diverse network of over 200 external partners who are involved in ongoing collaborative research and impact with Horizon, ranging from major international corporations to SMEs, from a wide variety of sectors, alongside government and civil society groups. We have also established a CDT in the third wave of funding that will eventually deliver 150 PhDs. Our critical mass of researchers, partners, students and funding has already led to over 800 peer-reviewed publications, composed of: 277 journal articles, 51 books and book chapters, and 424 conference papers, in a total of 15 different disciplines. Over the years Horizon's focus has evolved from an emphasis on the collection and understanding of personal data to consider the user-centred design and development of data-driven products. This proposal builds on our established interdisciplinary competencies to deliver research and impact to ensure that future data-driven products can be both co-created and trusted by consumers. Core to our current vision is the idea that future products will be hybrids of both the digital and the physical. Physical products are increasingly augmented with digital capabilities, from data footprints that capture their provenance to software that enables them to adapt their behaviour. Conversely, digital products are ultimately physically experienced by people in some real-world context and increasingly adapt to both. This real-world context is social; hence the data is social and often implicates groups, not just individuals. We foresee that this blending of physical and digital will drive the merging of traditional goods, services and experiences into new forms of product. We also foresee that - just as today's social media services are co-created by consumers who provide content and data - so will be these new data-driven products. At the same time, we are also witnessing a crisis of trust concerning the commercial use of personal data that threatens to undermine this vision of data-driven products. Hence, it is vitally important to build trust with consumers and operate within an increasingly complex regulatory environment from the earliest stages of innovating future products. Our user-centred approach involves external partners and the public in "research-in-the-wild", grounding our fundamental research in real world challenges. Our delivery programme combines a bottom-up approach in which researchers are given the opportunity (and provided with the skills) to follow new impact opportunities in collaboration with partners as they arise (our Agile programme), with a top-down approach that strategically coordinates how these activities are targeted at wider communities (our Campaigns programme, with successive focus on Consumables, Co-production and Welfare), and reflective processes that allow us to draw out broader conclusions for the widest possible impact (our Cross-Cutting programme). Throughout we aim to continue to develop the capacity in our researchers, the wider DE research community and more broadly within society, to engage in responsible innovation using personal data within the Digital Economy.

We will train a cohort of 65 PhD students to tackle the challenge of Data Creativity for the 21st century digital economy. In partnership with over 40 industry and academic partners, our students will establish the technologies and methods to enable producers and consumers to co-create smarter products in smarter ways and so establish trust in the use of personal data. Data is widely recognised by industry as being the 'fuel' that powers the economy. However, the highly personal nature of much data has raised concerns about privacy and ownership that threaten to undermine consumers' trust. Unlocking the economic potential of personal data while tackling societal concerns demands a new approach that balances the ability to innovate new products with building trust and ensuring compliance with a complex regulatory framework. This requires PhD students with a deep appreciation of the capabilities of emerging technology, the ability to innovate new products, but also an understanding of how this can be done in a responsible way. Our approach to this challenge is one of Data Creativity - enabling people to take control of their data and exercise greater agency by becoming creative consumers who actively co-create more trusted products. Driven by the needs of industry, public sector and third sector partners who have so far committed £1.6M of direct and £2.8M of in kind funding, we will explore multiple sectors including Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Food; Creative Industries; Health and Wellbeing; Personal Finance; and Smart Mobility and how it can unlock synergies between these. Our partners also represent interests in enabling technologies and the cross cutting concerns of privacy and security. Each student will work with industry, public, third sector or international partners to ensure that their research is grounded in real user needs, maximising its impact while also enhancing their future employability. External partners will be involved in PhD co-design, supervision, training, providing resources, hosting placements, setting industry-led challenge projects and steering. Addressing the challenges of Data Creativity demands a multi-disciplinary approach that combines expertise in technology development and human-centred methods with domain expertise across key sectors of the economy. Our students will be situated within Horizon, a leading centre for Digital Economy research and a vibrant environment that draws together a national research Hub, CDT and a network of over 100 industry, academic and international partners. We currently provide access to a network of >80 potential supervisors, ranging from leading Professors to talented early career researchers. This extends to academic partners at other Universities who will be involved in co-hosting and supervising our students, including the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. We run an integrated four-year training programme that features: a bespoke core covering key topics in Future Products, Enabling Technologies, Innovation and Responsibility; optional advanced specialist modules; internship and international exchanges; industry-led challenge projects; training in research methods and professional skills; modules dedicated to the PhD proposal, planning and write up; and many opportunities for cross-cohort collaboration including our annual industry conference, retreat and summer schools. Our Impact Fund supports students in deepening the impact of their research. Horizon has EDI considerations embedded throughout, from consideration of equal opportunities in recruitment to ensuring that we deliver an inclusive environment which supports diversity of needs and backgrounds in the student experience.