Article by Materahub

While working on our CHLAYDOSCOPE project, reflecting on how creative hubs leaders and managers could support, stimulate and inspire young people, particularly those having or willing to have a leading role in their own communities, the outlook moved naturally to a wider reflection on the power of creative industries to support an active engagement of young people in their cultural, social and even political life.

With the New European Bauhaus as a background policy, more and more professionals in the creative and cultural sectors will see finally recognized their contribution to community development, engagement of groups at risk of exclusion, in this youth is one of the most relevant, and impact on society’s wellbeing.

This recognition will allow the sector to valorise what has been a work done in the past and very much projected towards the future.

EU has funded plenty of initiatives which are going in this direction and that we will be more than happy to mention in this article. From Big Time Takeover, an Erasmus+ funded to support youth engagement in arts social projects, bringing them to reflect on the power and risks of social media and technologies, with the support of arts educators, to Motivate To Create, funded by Erasmus + to work on community arts and participatory practices to develop social action projects run by young people under the mentorship of artists and cultural professionals. Not to forget, those initiatives, like Play/Act which are exploring the role of young people and cultural professionals in urban regeneration culture based and the importance of the connections between arts and youth to redesign or reinvent places (placemaking) and cities.

In this scenario, it becomes more and more important using the experience of creative hubs to support young people and especially youth leaders to get a positive impact on their own communities, fostering change, sustainability and a European society to be open, accessible and equal as in the principles of the NEB.