Dear User,  

The toolbox you are navigating is developed by an international team of art and youth work practitioners from Spain, Turkey, Portugal and Iceland ( Meet the Team ). The idea of ARTivistic was born during the Covid-19 pandemic in October 2022. We have worked on the issues our societies face even in post-pandemic times, such as social peace, unemployment, inclusion and domestic violence. We believe that book would give you an insight view about using art and creativity within the youth work to create awareness among the young people. We try to congregate the theory and the practice for you to use in your daily youth work to promote the usage of art and creativity among young people.  

During the implementation of the project, we have directly worked with young people, youth workers and art practitioners to tackle the challenges the pandemic brought us. The methods developed have been tried out in national and international contexts within the project cycle and adopted according to the feedback received from the participants. 

ARTivistic comes from a combination of Activistic and Art. Activistic is a person who is disposed to take action or effectuate change. Thus, our project wants to effectuate a change by qualifying youth workers as artivists and change-makers. To do so and boost the creativity among the young people, we have used the divergent thinking methodology, which promotes and uses the methodology of out-of-the-box thinking. 

The toolbox has two sections: theory and practice.

The theory part includes : 

– Divergent Thinking in Art  

– Art as a tool for expression and for social change  

– Using the art to work with young people  

– Using the art to increase awareness  

– Compilation of Best Practices concerning the usage of art from worldwide 

In the practice section, we have compiled the methods that each partner developed. These methods were tried during the C1: ARTivistic Training for Youth Workers implemented in Alcala la Real, Spain, between 11-17 of April 2022. The methods developed have been used during the implementation of this training activity by the artists/youth workers involved in creating this very toolbox. You can find the training evaluation report from here.

We hope this toolbox will inspire and make you work with art in your youth work practices to promote creativity among young people.

ARTivistic Team

This educational resource was produced with the financial support of the European Union within Erasmus+ Programme. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the Asociación Socio-Cultural VerdeSur Alcalá and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.