BACKGROUNDCultural practice makes people reflexive and participatory, thereby developing individual and social capacities. This is identified in the literature as the intrinsic value of culture. When cultural practices translate into other fields such as health and education, they have other social and economic effects, such as preventing dropouts in education, improving health, making people more resilient, growth that is more inclusive, etc. These effects are instrumental values of culture [OECD (2018), Culture and Local Development]. Capitalizing on the intrinsic and the instrumental values of culture, now needed more than ever due to the Covid-19 pandemic and as a response to its economic and social impacts, in ENACTING, we present a method for civic engagement that uses video documentary to capture discourses within focused local settings and translocate them to online spaces. Our method aims to facilitate creativity, innovation, and active citizenship, as well as the exchange of perspectives between communities across these spaces.OBJECTIVESOur overarching objective is to promote common values, inclusion, civic engagement and participation through skills development in the arts and innovative digital practices.Therefore, the project aims to:- identify social challenges in local contexts, and provide a concrete methodology for doing so- promote skills development in the artistic digital practice of developing a social documentary by providing a web-based training on social documentary development (ENACTING MOOC). The course will enable learners to rethink local challenges in a creative way, and to put forward potential solutions to those, thus contributing to their community.- empower awareness, active citizenship, participation, social inclusion and foster innovative, intercommunity, intercultural dialogue, through the ENACTING Participatory Media Lab.- promote audience development and the use of digital means to create and disseminate cultural products, through the Participatory Media Lab, contributing to the recovery resilience of the CCS.TARGET GROUPSThe ENACTING MOOC and Participatory Media Lab will empower citizens in the focused local communities. They are ultimately targeted to all adults – youth and youth workers, elderly, trainers and educators, artists, migrants and refugees, disadvantaged groups, and all other interested persons. Also, the project targets local authorities, policy makers, grassroots and community organisations, youth clubs/centres, adult education institutions, local CCS, NGOs, social cooperatives and HEIs in arts and digital media education.RESULTSIO1: Identification of local challenges in urban settings. The major aim of the Local Challenges Assessment is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the present particularities, characteristics and social challenges in local urban settings. Besides Local Challenges Assessment, the IO will provide a concrete methodology for the identification of local challenges, that can be transferred and re-used in other contexts.IO2: ENACTING Social Documentary Film Training Course A comprehensive training course comprising a suite of modules and resources- that will support interested adult learners of all backgrounds as well as partners’ teaching and administrative staff to develop their skills in producing social documentary films by capitalizing on the ubiquity of new on-line learning environments and the pervasiveness of mobile devices and open source software.IO3: ENACTING MOOC - a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and a freely accessible Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) containing the training material developed. It also contains a Virtual Community space to support community interactions among learners, professors, and teaching assistants.IO4: ENACTING Participatory Media Lab - a collective virtual place that allows both to give visibility to the productions made by the participants from the different countries and to represent a space for dialogue and exchange.IMPACT- Learners’ acquisition of new skills on Social Documentary development, thus increased capacity of adults in social documentary/artistic production and digital skills- Enhanced awareness of adults on social issues, active citizenship and community engagement, social inclusion, promotion of common values, local innovation through creativity-Increased awareness of society regarding current challenges and increased capacity to suggest solutions and responses. - Increased resilience of cities and communities by engaging citizens in civic and collective actions.- Community development and intercommunity dialogue and exchange: increase social inclusion and cohesion between different groups in the society- Enhanced audience development and use of digital means to create and disseminate cultural products, thus contributing to the recovery resilience of the cultural and creative sectors

Artists, creators and small cultural non-profit organisations are facing for years an increasing social and economic instability, in most of European countries. The ongoing health crisis due to Covid-19, which makes the cultural sector step into hard times and deep changes, will further weaken their working and living conditions in the coming years. Women, people from less privileged background, from deprived neighborhood, with a migration background or a low level of academic education, are particularly disadvantaged in this situation. Yet their voices, narratives and perspectives are essential to ensuring living democracies, a strong social cohesion and a real cultural diversity. In the same way, cultural small non-profit organisations struggle to sustain a third path between public cultural services and cultural industries. Though, they are essential for the quality of daily life within local communities.To address the problem with a fresh perspective, we built an original partnership, which includes a University, a public enterprise specialized in adult education, and five private non-profit organisations from the arts and culture sector. Our project intends to design and implement innovative methods, contents and tools in order to train our target group in the concepts and issues of current major transitions: social, economic, environmental, digital and democratic. We especially aim to achieve four crucial objectives:- Build innovative approaches, expertise and tools for adult education in the arts and culture sector through the topics of transitions.- Gain a better understanding of the concepts, issues and new models at the heart of current major transitions and their potential of renewing and change making for the professional arts and culture sector in Europe.- Identify in these transitions the levers and opportunities enabling the target group to secure and sustain his activities and design innovative, inclusive and sustainable socio-economic models. - Enable the target group to acquire forward-looking and useful knowledges, skills and tools in order to individually and collectively act for change.Through this international and cross-sectoral cooperation, we will implement several learning and training activities, designed as a social innovation process and gathering around the project many complementary skills and perspectives.UNDERSTAND. A first phase will bring together, after a preliminary research and a needs assessment, 210 participants (target group members, adult education professionals, external experts and various local stakeholders such as academic institutions, local partners, local authorities), through 7 co-creation labs on the topic of transitions in the arts and culture, implemented locally by each partner.ENVISION ALTERNATIVES. Two international peer-to-peer trainings - each gathering 35 participants from the target group and partners organisations - will lead to design collectively innovative frame and contents of the local pilots and of two intellectual outputs : an easy-to-use digital tool kit, supporting the target group to design innovative and inclusive socio-economic models ; a short web serie, highlighting the issues faced by our target group and emphasizing new alternatives to overcome it.ENACT. Through 6 local pilot trainings, we will experiment these new methods and tools with 120 participants from the target group, enhance it through their feedback and hopefully foster the emergence of innovative socio-economic experimentations implemented locally.IMPACT AND DISSEMINATE. We trust that the INPACT project will enhance the personal and professional background of participants and lead them to impulse significant changes in their professional path, activities and organisations. By disseminating a useable and useful digital tool kit and a playful and creative web serie, freely available in 7 languages, we hope to develop the target group’s ability to think and act for change within their professional sector throughout Europe.The active promotion of the “real utopias”, created by participants through the local experimentations, will contribute to open new perspectives to address social and economic difficulties of artists, creators and small cultural non-profit organisations and to spread new narratives about possible and desirable changes within the arts and culture sector. Finally, we hope that the sustainability of the original INPACT partnership and its several local satellites will initiate new alternatives to strengthen the resilience of the arts and culture sector through adult education. The current situation shows us that developing the capacity of individual and organisations to anticipate crises, face its consequences and design innovative solutions to overcome it, are not prospective topics but urgent concrete needs.

CulTrees main goal has been a dynamic and add-on contribution to the educational methodology of Key Competence No 8 of the European Reference Framework (ERF): Cultural Awareness and Expression, in the field of Adult Education.Seven organizations from equal number of European countries, members of the International ROOTS&ROUTES network, cooperated from the beginning of the proposal writing time until the completion of the final report, under the coordination of SMouTh, in order to combine their potential in art education and Adult Education in key competences.CulTrees had set some specific goals:1. The development of a set of training methods and tools that can be used in non-formal education environments, making use of the benefits of peer learning and learning through art making in a variety of artistic expression media (theatre, dance, visual art, literary arts, etc.)2. The development of the teaching skills of professional art educators who participated in the training activities and the enhancement of their personal professional profile, as well as the level of their organization’s involvement in the field of Adult Education.3. The development of the adult trainees’ awareness about the cultural diversity in Europe and the need to be maintained.Each organization of the consortium took part in the project’s training activities with 3 people (21 trainers and education professionals) coming from the fields of performing arts education and adult education. Through the cooperation of the whole team, a 5-days training program was created, implemented in July 2018 in Larissa, in collaboration with the Mayoralty of Culture and Science of the Municipality of Larissa and Unesco’s “Learning Cities” network.In this training program, each participant acted both as a trainer and trainee, leading as a trainer the method he/she had prepared to propose to the group, while being trained in all the other methods, in order to be able to evaluate and use them in his/her own activity framework in his/her country.For the dissemination and promotion of this 5-days training activity in Larissa, a 1-minute video teaser was created, published in all social media and local events related to adult education. Also, a greek-language printed flyer in 500 copies has been distributed to stakeholder local organizations, groups and individuals from the Adult Education sector.The promotion of the activity in local level, besides the dissemination of the project, aimed also at the inclusion of a small number of adult trainees in selected workshops of the five-days Larissa training and their function as a reference group in terms of the needs and interests of the end users of CulTrees outcomes (adult learners). This group took also part in every method’s evaluation round that took place at the end of the workshops, offering valuable experience to the CulTrees team.This experience has been imprinted in the collection of all training tools and methods in a shared “CulTrees Methods Descriptions” document. Each participant developed a detailed description of his/her method in a way that it can be applied by the rest of CulTrees trainers. By doing so, each trainer was initially invited to join the project with 1 method, and finally he/she was given access to a collection of 18 methods to apply in training activities in his/her country.The utilization of the whole of CulTrees methods has been implemented through small scale training activities in each participating country during the final 3 months of the project (Oct-Dec 2018).The participating trainers applied the methods they have been trained at from their peers in corresponding target groups in their countries and they had been asked to describe their experience in the project’s final management meeting in Florence in December 2018.CulTrees activities and outcomes had a particularly positive effect in the professional and educational profiles of the participants, as they focused on the opening of their own and their organizations’ professional involvement in Adult Education, in a concrete and sustainable way. The team’s networking activities in local, national and European level have already created the need to spread the knowledge and expertise developed through CulTrees to other organizations and consortiums, while the team is planning future cooperations in order to positively affect the training methodology in Cultural Awareness and Expression in the field of Adult Education in Europe.

The DeTalks project started to be designed in May 2017. At that time, Europe continued to receive tens of thousands of people daily, mainly through the southern and eastern borders. This potential diversification in population flared up radical right and populist rhetoric and reproduced an attitude of fear towards the unknown, the different, the other. Against this rhetoric of fear, the European Union, governments, local authorities, thousands of people, either organised in Civil Society organisations or autonomous, acted towards finding ways to welcome Europe’s new citizens and creating a space of more solidarity, equality, and education opportunities for all. At that time, the concept of DeTalks seemed ideal. Six active cultural-artistic organisations from the ROOTS & ROUTES International network, with significant experience in inclusive art-based education, together with the leading institution for refugees, asylum seekers’ and migrants’ linguistic training in Sweden, designed a project in the firm conviction that social inclusion of Europe’s new citizens is based on the development of communication.Non formal educational practices applied in artistic development (expression tools) are combined to the early stages of linguistic training, to create an educational material based on humans’ innate ability to communicate non verbally; because, for new immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Europe, acquisition of the host society’s language cannot be restricted only to grammar and vocabulary. Someone who focuses on grammar will become a grammar expert, and someone who focuses on vocabulary will become a walking dictionary, but to communicate with natives, a turn of attention to other crucial aspects of communication is needed.Non verbal value of culture (that enables feelings and attitudes) has been neglected by the linguistic education of the newcomer citizens of Europe. We can convey a lot of information in body language, facial expressions, volume and tone of the words we use, in the use of spacing and in what precisely we do between the words, as well as in our image, clothing, behavior, and even when not knowing what to say or do. Cultural and social aspects are stronger and wider aspects of communication than grammar and vocabulary could ever be. According to this, non verbal communication would not just support the acquisition of the host society’s language, but would also facilitate cultural meaning exchanges, and finally support intercultural communication. DeTalks includes in its framework also locals of the same age as the main target group. We created a safe educational environment, where we could encourage and facilitate non verbal communication between local and newcomer youth, incorporating peer learning methodology and simultaneously developing two dimensions of inclusive education: intercultural communication (through the development of non verbal and para-verbal elements) and mutual understanding (through collaboration).DeTalks is designed to extract talking from communication by focusing on the social aspect of learning a language, in the ways people express themselves, and on the inclusive potential of non verbal communication, having three, interrelated main goals:1. to use, in the best possible way, the power of non verbal communication in the linguistic education of new immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers;2. to create environments of non formal education where the trainees will develop their communication skills through performing arts and media;3. to develop an essential inclusive role for the young people of the host societies through the correlation with the new immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, by applying the peer coaching method. The DeTalks project has developed a Guidebook with 18 practices, selected as a set of energisers/practices that we believed could and can be applied in the linguistic training of Europe’s new citizens. For each practice presented, you can find clear instructions, practical tips, and hands-on information. In non verbal practices, the visual element, sound, and body language are at the very core of the work. Therefore, most practices are accompanied by video tutorials that you can find here: http://www.rootsnroutes.eu/detalksvideos/The DeTalks project brought together artists, pedagogues, language teachers, and social workers working with migrants and asylum seekers around a specific goal: to explore new creative techniques related to non verbal communication in order to facilitate a positive approach to the languages and culture of host countries. Young artists, youth workers, and educators contributed to the DeTalks project with their competencies, while they at the same time were educated/trained to the innovative DeTalks method. During the project time, they have created a professiona l network, not only at local but regional and international levels too.

"European countries face a major challenge. They must maintain an inclusive society and ensure unity and cohesion among the EU member countries in a context of high political, societal, economic and social tensions and inequalities. The intention of the project ""Art4Act - Art in Action for an Inclusive Society"" is to experiment with the practices and tools of art and non-formal education to promote freedom of expression, intercultural social inclusion and respect for others.We believe that a large part of the objectives set during the writing of the project have been achieved, we now form a perennial network of organizations active with young people, in the arts and culture sector in Europe and the Mediterranean, who promotes diversity and fights racism; we support the exchange of good practice between European and non-European operators on the refugee crisis; we have involved local communities in building narratives that give them the floor. The last objective was achieved in part because we managed to create an open confrontation between the project partners about the need to reinvest the public space as a meeting space, but only one performance took place in the public space (performance achieved following the pilot).Art4Act brings together eight structures, seven of which are based in the European Union and one in Tunisia. Six organizations are members of the Roots and Routes International network, which promotes cultural and social diversity in the performing arts and contemporary media. Since 2001, the network has organized trainings, shows and events, exchanges and mobility programs for young talents in dance, music and media in 10 European countries.During 2 years, the main activities were: 4 transnational meetings, 2 seminars (capacity buiding workshop), 1 pilot activity / partners led by youth workers and artists with young people from local communities who gave rise to public restitution / countries, public events, 1 event / partner, which allowed us to share the results and lessons learned from the project with a wider specialized audience.At the end of our collaboration, we published an ""educational kit"" (artistic practices developed during the seminars and implemented at the local level during the pilots, 3 essays, bibliography) on the theme of the project and a series of videos reporting activities for youth workers and young people carried out by each partner at the local level."