YES Forum - Empowering young people - PhotoVoice - Participation & Empowerment in Youth Work

Context:

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, our lives and the way we perceive social interactions have changed drastically.

Youth organisations have had to reinvent themselves, find new ways of working and interacting to ensure that those in the most vulnerable situations would still be supported. These adaptations call for innovative and creative practices.

That is why with the VOICE project, we want to engage youth organisations, formal education institutions as well as creative actors to work together towards professional youth work in Europe.

Objectives:

By bringing together future and current youth workers, young people and creative organisations (eg. photographers and graphic designers), the VOICE project aims at promoting the method of Photovoice in youth work, to make it more recognized as a creative tool that future and current youth workers can use to promote social inclusion, engagement and active citizenship of young people.

What is Photovoice?

Results' flyer

Results:

With this video, you will learn the basic steps to apply the photovoice method.

Watch the tutorial

Subtitles available in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, German & Italian.

As part of the VOICE project, young students and youth & social workers from Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands were trained to become Photovoice facilitators themselves in May and July 2022.

You can now check their diverse results! While being the VOICE participants’ own contribution to the European Year of Youth, these results also showcase how effective Photovoice is in facilitating self- and collective expression, and to what kind of authentic and impactful outcomes it can lead to!

To the exhibition

Exhibition also available in Bulgarian, Dutch, German & Italian.

The Photovoice results of the participants in the trainings were also showcased in on-site exhibitions in Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Here you can find all the exhibitions' materials in different languages.

A guide tailored to the needs of social work students in Europe, providing an overview of the theory behind Photovoice

Bulgarian Dutch Italian German

Training material

Ready-to-use material to combine with the VOICE handbook, to make it even easier to handle for beginners.

Based on the VOICE experiences and results, we summarised the following key messages in the form of recommendations for education and training institutions, organisations and practitioners in the youth and social field and policy-makers.

Learning-by-doing approach

VOICE has trained about 80 social work students as well as young social & youth workers from Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands through several trainings held in May and July 2022.

Through a combination of theoretical input and “hands-in” practical learning, these participants learned how to use the Photovoice method so that they can, in their future activities, work towards more inclusive societies by empowering local communities thanks to this innovative and creative tool for individual and collective expression.

During the proccess they produced the VOICE project's Photovoice results answering to the questions "How do you imagine your European utopia in 20 years?" and "How would you describe the life of a young person in Europe to an alien?".

More about the trainings

Viareggio's training report

Vienna's training report

Spreading the word about Photovoice's benefits

Multiplier event in Brussels (26 October 2022)

In October 26th 2022, the YES Forum held the VOICE project's multiplier event in Brussels. Both the project and the benefits of the Photovoice method were presented to professionals from the social and youth work field, young people and policy-makers.

Two participants from the youth workers trainings in Italy, Kim Köhler and Olga Vlasova, led two informative sessions and held the interactive fair with the promotion of the results of the project so far.

Initially they presented the Photovoice method and the project results to a group of German-speaking young people (mostly teenagers) coming from various backgrounds and their accompanying youth workers, in German.

Later on they had the opportunity to present the project during the YES Forum Policy Event in a plenary session and in a interactive fair. There they welcomed all interested parties and had the chance to promote the VOICE project more in detail.

An academic poster developed by the partnership to showcase the method use in social and youth work was the starting point for discussions. The online exhibition created with the photographs of the training participants were also promoted in the fair.

The participants found the Photovoice method an interesting approach to stimulate creativity and civic engagement and a particularly useful tool to engage young people from various backgrounds.