COMANITY is an Erasmus+ KA3 ‘Support for Policy Reform’ action coordinated by Arcola Research, UK, involving 9 European partners from the UK, Italy, Spain, Greece and Belgium over two years (2017-2019). The consortium aims to develop an ‘inclusive learning ecosystem’ for marginalised and vulnerable young people through the creation of a “Community Animateur” programme. The Community Animateur’s role will be to bridge the existing gap between young people on the margins and ‘mainstream’ institutions by acting as a “Social Mediator”. The project has a dual ambition: getting youth services to become more engaged with marginalised youth; getting marginalised young people to become more engaged in youth work. The project strategy starts with identifying the competences needed to train future Community Animateurs. These are then converted into a Competence Framework, which forms the basis of a training programme. The programme will be implemented and evaluated in four pilot sites,  and the results disseminated to support scaling up and out within the wider EU field.

Main outputs:

• Competence Framework: identifies the key competences needed to develop the Community Animateur role and provides an assessment tool for youth workers and volunteers
• COMANITY Technical Platform and Learning Village: combines OER resources with user-generated knowledge to support and maximise learning
• COMANITY Training programme: combines self-directed learning on-line with  collaborative learning involving the COMANITY team
• Evaluation toolkit: uses a “Theory of change” approach and embeds evaluation in the project throughout its life cycle
• Transferability and Replication toolkit: provides a clear guide to how the programme and tools can be accessed and autonomously used after the end of the project, based on the pilot test