DIVERSITY REVOLUTION: From value to practice

<< Background >>Diversity is positioned highly in the EU value system. But still, in practice, diversity is more often than not, seen as an obstacle that needs to be overcome, and not as something we should thrive to. Youth work, education and social welfare system, the systems that youth, and especially youth with fewer opportunities interact the most, are the main focus of our project. The issue is that organisations/institutions have different levels of organisational culture (regulations, procedures, practices), climate (relationships between managers, staff and youth) and competences (of their managers, staff and youth they work with) that all affect their overall influence on youth. All these elements are highly important for diversity fostering and should be complementary to each other in order for the organisation to reach to and respond to needs of all youth. Throughout the project, we wanted to support organisations and institutions enhance their fostering of diversity in practice, by helping them view this issue holistically, „find their way“ through possibilities offered to them, so they can navigate towards those enhancement resources that are relevant for their specific cultural/climate/competences needs.<< Objectives >>By implementing this project we wanted to innovate the support for organisations and institutions for their diversity fostering practices, to systematize existing knowledge, assessment and good practice resources regarding diversity and to provide the youth, education and social welfare an “all-in-one” resource for fostering diversity in their work with all youth that will help them create a diversity revolution in their organisations.<< Implementation >>In the project, our main focus was creating the project result: Diversity package, a toolbox consisting of 3 collections covering: (1) current knowledge (evidence-based) regarding the topic of fostering diversity in the youth sector (including a form of minimal-standards for fostering diversity); (2) assessment tools for assessing the context level (focused around the organisational culture), relationship level (focused around the organisational climate) and individual level (focused at relevant competences of managers and staff and fostering diversity in youth); and (3) practical resources as good practice examples and enhancement suggestions for each element of fostering diversity. We gathered a team of experts from Serbia, Italy and Slovenia, from the field of youth, education, social welfare and scientific-research who worked on the comprehensive publication, that is now available to both in printed and in e-version, in 4 languages. For testing the Diversity package, we organized 1 short-term joint staff training, where we went through the steps for developing a Diversity profile of organisations/institutions. In addition, we organized local testing of our material through 9 focus groups, and included examples of organisations of different cultural background, size, type and sector in our good practice collection. We organized a series of multiplier events in the sectors of youth work, education and social welfare to empower experts to use our recourse. All activities were followed with promotion and dissemination efforts in order to reach as much relevant people as possible to support our diversity revolution. In order to ensure the quality of the project implementation, transnational project meeting were held and continuance PMI activities were implemented.<< Results >>Through the project we united contemporary knowledge, assessment tools and practical resources on diversity in a comprehensive holistic toolbox, we provided managers and staff from 3 sectors (youth work, education and social welfare) with a new holistic resource on diversity in their hands for assessing and enhancing their culture, climate and competences which brings the CSO’s, schools and social welfare institutions to enhance their diversity fostering in their work with all youth with the use of the Diversity package.