Who am I:
Rachael Mutch, Project Officer for Ariel Trust’s new digital literacy project ‘Building Resilience in an online world’.
About the Project:
Over a three year period the project will be working with 240 young people using creative workshops that focus on equipping the young people with a set of skills that enables them to become more resilient when coping with the online world and the pressures of social media.
‘In a web-based survey of 12- to 17-year-olds, of whom most had experienced at least one cyberbullying incident in the past year, Juvonen & Gross found that 90% of the victims did not tell their parents about their experiences and 50% of them justified it with “I need to learn to deal with it myself”’. (Cyberbullying and its impact on young people’s emotional health and well-being, Helen Cowie)
The project will revisit the art of communication and develop empathy skills that will in turn help young people to identify their own feelings and teach them how to arrive at a solution to conflict they are facing.
The process:
I am currently in a consultation process with a range of Merseyside Schools and Youth Clubs. During this time I will be identifying the needs of the various groups in a hope to then move forward with the project. We will be developing a six week programme of workshop based sessions and will use a range of media to explore the young people’s ideas which will result in a final project ‘production’.
