Disadvantaged young people are very frequently excluded from the media and they are not able to make their voice heard. This influences significantly their civic engagement and democratic participation. On the other hand, podcasts and vidcasts are a means of communication and expression that is becoming increasingly popular, it is low-cost to create and easy to be promoted.

However, podcasts have not been used until now in youth work as a means to increase the democratic participation of young people. The proposed project is aiming to achieve this goal by providing young people with the capacities and skills to create their own podcasts, by escorting them through the whole process of podcast and vid-cast creation; from looking to get inspired and creative in order to conceive the ideas and thematics of the podcasts, to actually recording, editing, and promoting their podcast among their peers. This will be achieved also through the empowerment of youth workers and the development of their skills so that they can assist the disadvantaged young people in the process and the development of the skills of the young people themselves top increase their democratic participation.

The project is first going to develop a methodology and training materials on how podcasts can be used as tool for civic engagement and then it is going to organize training seminars for youth workers and young people (both online in synchronous (webinar) form, and asynchronous (e-learning materials) form. The young people trained are going to create podcasts and vidcasts both in their national language and in English through international cooperation.

Moreover, a large-scale international festival is going to be organized in order to mainstream podcast creation as a means of democratic participation for the whole Europe.