<< Background >>The Open Minds consortium has identified a need for radically inclusive and innovative approaches to education in the Covid era and beyond. These approaches must support the upskilling of all young people, foster resilience and address societal challenges at both a local and international level, and allow for the creation of an inclusive and transnational European network of creative youth. They must tackle the challenges of travel restrictions and health precautions while allowing for the transnational meeting of minds for which Erasmus was created. It is particularly critical that no perspective and no contribution is excluded when addressing the increasingly urgent societal challenges facing Europe’s young people, and so the consortium has embraced the strategy of ‘radical inclusion’, rather than simply following a compliance approach to making participation accessible. Radical inclusion ensures participation by those whose voices often go unheard - particularly those young people living with disabilities, and whose contribution is often excluded or overlooked. The societal, environmental, political, economic and technological issues facing Europe all have an important cultural dimension, and it is by centering culture and creativity, as well as the affordances of new technologies to solve the issues preventing inclusion.<< Objectives >>Open Minds creates a transnational European youth network of creative problem solving, addressing diversity, social innovation, inclusion and accessibility. The project innovates a methodology to synchronise young minds from diverse European locations and the Western Balkans region around grand challenges. By co-creating simultaneously, both in person and online, young people act in synchrony, bounce ideas back and forth across cultural, geographical and economical divides, and co-create solutions in real time. Open Minds does not simply provide tools for online learning, but cross-fertilises the learning experience for young people across Europe. These moments of revelation about each other’s contribution to solving challenges propose a new mission for Erasmus: Synchronising bright minds across Europe.The consortium of the Open Minds project sees the cultural core value – creativity – as the driver of change that can support and develop local communities in response to grand challenges. By developing an innovative methodology and technological infrastructure for working with young people in the Covid era, Open Minds explores both local and international creative collaboration to address social inclusion, resilience, upskilling and sustainable development. Open Minds aims to shift the core focus from physical travel to synchronising young minds from diverse European locations around great societal challenges. The objective of the Open Minds project is to create the foundations for development of highly inclusive local ecosystems in Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Croatia and Albania by innovating methodology for radical inclusion of disabled youth through arts, culture and technology.<< Implementation >>In order to achieve the objective, the partners will build upon their extensive experience in using technology, arts and culture as a means of achieving social inclusion for different excluded groups in order to facilitate radical inclusion for young, creative disabled people. The project includes a co-creation process with young people with disabilities to develop a methodology, transferable pedagogical toolkit and learning path through practical collaborative innovation and case study research aimed at identifying exclusion factors in local communities and collection of digital assets used for presenting identified societal challenges. The developed educational path will be tested on 200 young people and 30 youth workers with a background in arts and culture and/or technology and 28 young disabled creatives. During the education, young people and youth workers will define 30 challenges for which they will build social innovations that address issues of inclusion and accessibility in their local ecosystems during the Creative Innovation Labs (CIL). For the CIL, local participants will be involved physically in one place (one Satellite Lab) and will have a direct window between the simultaneous Satellite Labs in Umeå, Zagreb, Tampere, Tirana and Porto. Participants will jointly experience inspirational talks and brainstorming session, and innovation building teams will be self-organised by interest rather than location, allowing for teams to gather either locally (all team members in the same Satellite Lab) or remotely (members from 2 or more Satellite Labs). The environment for testing the developed methodology will be instrumental to the multinational collaborative co-creation and co-design that supports the development of inclusive and accessible local communities. Innovations created during the CIL will be further developed in the incubators hosted by partner organisations with ongoing remote collaboration of young people, youth workers and young people with disabilities. It is expected that 20 innovations will be developed through a process of mentorship in order to be used to achieve radical inclusion of youth in the local ecosystem. The developed methodology will be evaluated and its piloting in 5 local ecosystems will be explained in detail in a Best Practice Rulebook. The aim of the Rulebook is to be adopted and used by newly established Satellite Labs in local ecosystems to extend the impact of the project far beyond the reach of the partnership and funding.<< Results >>Open Minds is created to be highly re-usable and its impact extends far beyond the tangible outputs of the consortium activities. It is designed as a multiplier for social inclusion, transferable innovation methodology and toolkit for local community ecosystems, a generator for new business ideas and learning paths for young people as well as an engine for social cohesion and resilience in Europe and between the EU members and the Western Balkans region. Open Minds is a methodology that can be shared and used for radical inclusion to address geographical and social obstacles and to both reveal and tackle the structural and systemic nature of a wide range of disabilities. In addition, while the methodology builds on the affordances of available new technologies, it is not dependent on any particular technology. Rather, it is equally applicable to existing technologies and to technologies that are yet to be developed. It is an innovation methodology that brings together diverse creative minds in a way that iterates on its form, and so improves and adapts in every context it is deployed. Open Minds is not imagined as a two year project in the traditional sense that would see it come to an end after the funded activities. It is proposed as a two year development and delivery of a methodology that can be shared, built upon and grown long beyond the life of the project.