Music for youth empowerment meeting held Italy

The kick off meeting between the various partners for the BOEMI – Building our employment skills through Music Investigations and new media project was recently held in Palermo Italy from the 26th of April to the 1ST of May 2015.

The Music for youth empowerment BOEMI is an innovative project – co-founded by the European Commission within the Erasmus + Program, Capacity Building on the field of youth and coordinated by Centro per lo Sviluppo Creativo “Danilo Dolci”.

The project seeks to empower youth workers and young people with fewer opportunities by promoting their competences and skills and to foster an active participation in their local communities and also to build their self-confidence through music, new media as well as non-formal methodologies like Danilo Dolci’s Reciprocal Maieutic Approach – as tools for youth development and more specifically to raise employability skills of over 270 young people from Africa and Europe.

There are 5 countries from Africa and Europe that is (Creativo “Danilo Dolci”, Italy; Crossing Borders, Denmark; Pandora, Spain) and from Africa (IYEC, Ghana and Gno Far, Senegal) that are taking part in the project. The Director of IYEC, Mercy Osei Owusu who is also the project manager of the project represented IYEC at the Kick off Meeting in Palermo. The meeting was also represented by 3 people from each organization (among them, musicians, youth workers with musical background, youth interested in music and new media.

At the meeting, the partners discussed and shared ideas about the project’s area and discussed about the activities planning as well as tasks and roles each partner is responsible for and the next steps to be taken.

Each partner will select a local working group that will carry out a research on traditional local music, collecting traditional songs that will be recorded and complied on the music platform of the project. The, youth and youth worker involved in the project will participate in an International Training Course to be held in Madrid Spain in November, which will be followed by local workshops and a final concert in Palermo Italy as well as in each of the partner countries.

This first Kick off meeting, held in the Centro per lo Sviluppo Creativo “Danilo Dolci” Palermo Italy, has given way to the partners to have a first experience of musical and cultural context of the other participant countries and to establish objectives, procedures and working methods for the future.

To find out more, please contact IYEC on iyec@iyec.org or fill the membership form on your site.