Fewer Opportunities Re-thinking Z to A

F.O.R.Z.A is the project Acronym for Fewer Opportunities Rethinking Z to A. In this project A ROCCA has the role of a Coordinator, and the Strategic Partnership is created between organisations coming from Portugal, Spain and North Macedonia.

The overall objective of F.O.R.Z.A is to initiate the strategic digital transformation of youth work and raise awareness about the entrepreneurial potential of social media marketing as a new form of youth employment. The project was inspired by the needs of young people in a globalizing digital reality and the needs of youth workers in a form of digitalization and transnationality of youth work through the creation of free open digital educational resources.

F.O.R.Z.A promotes the use of ICT in youth work and employment and creates synergies among youth organizations and other stakeholders on a local and national level. Social Media Marketing represents the core of the learning component. The methodology employs a holistic approach and learning by doing with a strong practical part with learning objectives set to produce Social Media Marketing professionals according to the standards of the labor market.

One of the main innovations that this project brings it’s the development of the Digital Social Inclusion Strategy, designed to engage youth works from all around the EU in a digital update. The strategy will present tools for extracting and management of data as the first step in the creation of individual learning curricula. The second step toward individual learning curricula will be the strategic use of digital tools for directing feedback and evaluation. The strategy will pilot an institutional framework that could be easily exploited and adapted in any organization on the EU level. The learning added value of this project is represented by the e-learning platform dedicated to Social Media Marketing. The platform is envisioned to deliver a labor market ready curriculum that will be managed by youth workers. There will be five distinctive yet coherent modules with clear learning objectives. 

Module 1 will provide professional practical inside of media content creation, Module 2 and Module 3 will be dedicated to the legal and business side of Social Media Marketing in different national and wider EU contexts. Module 4 will provide information about media literacy and ethics while Module 5 will represent the core of Social Media Marketing, designed to upskill the participants in Social Media Analytics and Social Media Storytelling.

The main two Social Media Channels used as a practical learning experience will be Facebook and Instagram, as they both integrate other social media channels under their framework.

The third IO that is particularly designed to answer the needs of youth workers is the methodological guide for working with troubled youth. The project team, as part of the pre-project research, reached a conclusion that a guide for youth workers covering that topic, in particular, could not be found. The guide is envisioned to provide a methodological top-down approach in the work with troubled youth and young people with fewer opportunities. Departing from the understanding of the complexity of the personal approach, the background of the target group, and the management of negative bias. Following a logical order, in continuation with workshops and practical engagements, coming to a finish with evaluation and feedback methodology to enhance the impact.

Powerful dissemination and exploration strategy with a strong visual identity is something that the team of A Rocca takes pride in. For this project, the strategy will portray the perfect balance between online and offline events. The offline events will take the form of National conferences followed by a big European event to be held in Sicily, while the online events will ensure the presence on every major social media channel. The online and offline communities together with the associated partners will transform the results of this project into an EU-wide network for cooperation and exchange of good practices in the field of digitalization. The consortium will deliver five new projects as part of the sustainability component and will support the work of the SMM peer educators on local and regional levels.