Hosting Empowerment

We are a group of dedicated leaders and facilitators from Germany, Italy, Hungary, Sweden, Austria, Portugal and the US who work in “Transformation Academies”. We all empower and support individuals and teams to actively shape society towards a more humane, joyful and sustainable world.

Over the next three years, we will research on how to create settings that strengthen courage, self-confidence, and self-efficacy. The focus is on people who work with disadvantaged groups of all kinds. We will develop a guidebook for facilitators, a microlearning empowerment app, empowerment tools for our method database, a playbook, and a short film.

Context: New Active Citizenship in Europe

The role of active citizenship in Europe has undergone a change in the last few decades. Many citizens no longer feel attracted by established institutions like political parties, churches or charity organisations; representation by such organisations is seen as only one way of influencing events. Citizens want to directly participate. Therefore new demands have arisen, such as the need of support for individuals starting new initiatives or creating transformation processes. Governments, NGOs and groups of citizens need tools to facilitate approaches to tackle their own issues more effectively. Driven by this outlook, the seven partner organisations Art Monastery Italia (Italy), Plenum (Austria), Legacy17 (Sweden), Biovilla (Portugal),Rogers Foundation (Hungary) and Visionautik Akademie (Germany) work as “Transformation Academies” that empower and enable citizens to tackle the challenges they face.

Objective: Empower citizens to shape society

In our experience one of the biggest obstacles to contributing to positive social change has shown to be the lack of confidence in individuals and groups that they are able to effectuate

change. As they are the ones who are experiencing the brunt of the problems it is most impactful if the solutions come from them. Therefore our project focuses on empowering

citizens to take action and improve their own circumstances. Empowerment is one of the three pillars of social innovation, alongside “meeting human needs” and “changing social

relations”.

Target groups:

-We’ll empower vulnerable people suffering from pressing problems like poverty, marginalization, stigma or exclusion. We will enable and encourage them to improve their situations and thus give power to one of our basic beliefs: “Everyone has the right to shape the world with joy and ease.” We aim to reach individuals such as refugees, the ethnic minorities, unemployed or homeless, those with chronic illnesses or other disabilities.

-We will also empower group leaders, facilitators and social innovators who are important drivers for change. Empowered leaders can do better work for the common good without burning out and are good inspirations and role models. We will provide them with empowering facilitation methods they can use in their work. We aim to reach 30.000 of these leaders over the course of the project. They, in turn, have the potential to impact many thousands more.

Activities: Empowerment products for support

We will create five products that will be available for free to everyone and actively promote them to the above mentioned groups and to the general public:

Hosting Empowerment Guidebook will act as a resource and support to social workers, facilitators, teachers, and anyone who works with disadvantaged groups
App for empowerment with playful and experiential content
Self-empowerment workbook that can be self-paced or experienced in groups, available in nine languages
Toolbox for facilitators: a collection of 50 new empowerment methods added to an existing database on facilitation methods
Short film to inspire, uplift and empower

We will disseminate our approach and our empowering products with 10 events in our partners’ countries. They will each last one day and serve facilitators or

inspirational leaders in the field of lifelong learning.