Karoonda Youth-Led Recovery Technology Initiative Project
The Karoonda Youth-Led Recovery Technology Initiative project will enable young people in Karoonda to build digital skills and increase their capacity for employment in the digital marketplace.
This project was developed in response to the Karoonda Youth Action Committee who reported that young people in the community were particularly disadvantaged due to the impacts of COVID-19. They noted that young people experienced significant social isolation and despair, exacerbated by the lack of employment, training and educational opportunities.
The Karoonda Youth-Led Recovery Technology Initiative is led by the Youth Action Committee and aims to respond to the impact of COVID-19 on the community. The project will enable young people aged 12-24 years to build digital and business skills, reduce their isolation and increase their capacity for employment in the digital marketplace bot locally and globally.
The project will enable young people to mentor and support Karoonda businesses to digitally transition their services and products with the aim to create ongoing employment for Karoondas young people, connect them to the local and global business environment and increase the capacity of our local businesses to deliver services in the digital marketplace.
This project aligns with the SA Youth Action Plan as it will create direct opportunities for Karoonda's youth to earn and learn through the following experiences:
- The improvement of the Karoonda app and website.
- Development of websites and apps for local businesses.
Project Achievements
The project engaged 24 youth in Karoonda East Murray and has helped increase social and emotional wellbeing through greater youth engagement with businesses in our district. Being the small community that Karoonda East Murray are, we already experience significant social isolation, and this has been magnified further with the impact of COVID-19.
This project has helped increase a support network between our youth and local businesses. The education workshops were an important step towards achieving this, which provided opportunities for the youth and businesses to share their knowledge and increase their skills (digital and business skills).
Traditionally our youth don’t mix outside of their own family circle and have limited access to opportunities that can contribute to the greater community and in this case the business community. The workshops were quite hands on in that the youth and business worked together to learn how to improve their online presence and build in the QR technology.
It enabled young people to mentor and support Karoonda businesses to digitally transition online and local business to mentor young people in business skills. Thus creating an ongoing employment opportunity for our young people and connect them to the local business environment, whilst also increasing the capacity of our local business to deliver services in the digital space whether it be through a website, social media, YouTube etc.
This project has helped local businesses and youth to better deal with the growing demand for having an online presence and connection following the impacts of COVID-19.
Project Management:
A working group was established between Council, the Mallee Business Association, Youth Action Committee (YAC) and local business owners.
Local young person, Tamikha Ross was appointed Project Officer. Working closely with the YAC to help mentor and administer participants during the project.
We engaged with 2 technology partners; 'Plastyk Studios' a web and sales integration company and 'Purple Giraffee' a digital and marketing consultancy.
Youth IT Training Program:
After consulting with the YAC, our technology partners ''Plastyk Studios' and 'Purple Giraffee' developed training workshops that were presented to both the youth and local businesses.
Purple Giraffe (24 student attendees 12 - 16 years)was a marketing-based workshop that explored various different engagement tools. A key outcome of this workshop was building each student a communication tool kit to determine different communication styles and platforms that could be used to achieve different results and engage different audiences.
Workshop 1 ''Plastyk Studios' (28 student attendees 12 - 16 years and 5 businesses with 6 attendees) presented a 'Business & Youth' workshop. This was primarily aimed at building relationships for all attendees outside of their normal spheres.
In what was designed to be a specialised training opportunity to learn about the various 'out of the box' platforms available for creating websites that included e-commerce, cloud-based applications and payment systems.
Students worked with the business owners to understand the individual businesses, challenges and requirements moving forward. Businesses shared their learnings from being business operators in a small town. There was a really great level of information exchange to help inform the day 2 workshop with the students only.
Workshop 2 "Plastyk Studios" (28 Student Attendees) was a 'Youth Only' workshop which was a more advance hands-on session showing them how to develop websites using 2 different digital platforms. The students workshopped a fictitious business and products and then used their own devices to develop and build their ecommerce platform to market their business and product. This exercise required them to draw on their learnings from the previous two workshops to produce a result.
Project Outcomes
The project has achieved individual and community social and emotional wellbeing by physically bringing youth and business groups of our district together to learn in a group environment and work towards a common goal. Further developing their digital and technology skills.
The project gave the youth greater engagement with local businesses owners, which they wouldn't usually have access to, which has strengthened both their social and communication skills and relationships with the businesses.
The project has also helped to build business economic wellbeing and resilience through digital workshops for businesses to attend to grow their skills in technology platforms and to reduce their reliance on physical trading. The economic impact of this cannot be fully measured at this current stage. Individual surveys/interviews and further case studies will be considered, 6 - 12 months after the project completion date.
The project has reduced social isolation in our community by bringing together the youth of the district and local businesses, working alongside each other to learn new skills. It has also provided essential knowledge to the youth that they can use within their community moving forward and into the future.
Through building digital skills of both youth and local businesses through workshops the project has helped increase both groups online presence and digital inclusion. The Mallee Business Association reported identified that the lack of digital capabilities to continue to trade during COVID-19. The YAC identified an increase in social isolation during COVID-19, in an already remote regional area. This project offered solutions to both of the issues that the groups faced.
A detailed evaluation plan was developed that helped Council staff measure the impacts and outcomes of this project.
Process and impact evaluation methods were used to evaluate the project using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
The immediate impacts of this project on our target group were delivered largely from the workshops. Students were able to demonstrate different communication styles to engage different audiences. Students developed a mock-up e-commerce site, respectful of the challenges the local business owners identified and considerate of geographical and IT challenges.
Business owners and students connected during their workshop to define a roadmap to achieve the individual websites.
The greater community will benefit from the additional relationships and increased knowledge with the project contributing outputs such as a re-developed Karoonda.com tourism website, QR information codes for local businesses, walking trails and historical sites.
The longer term outcomes will include monitoring the engagement and effectiveness of the new site (when complete), measuring the increase in visitors to the district and continuing to foster and promote development and mentoring between business owners and young people in the community.
Ongoing Learning and Collaborations
The major learning from this project has been around the social and technological isolation faced by young people in the district. Whilst remote engagement was identified as a valid strategy in the event of COVID restrictions, I don't think that the true impact of the lack of connectivity was truly appreciated.
Participants in the project all go to school in Karoonda but live up to 60km from town - often in very marginal mobile phone and internet areas. Karoonda also has very low socioeconomics which means that some of the youth rely on third party support to access devices.
Outcomes from this project will be incorporated into both councils Youth Action Committee and the Mallee Business Association.
This project has provided the council with the opportunity to transition the local community newsletter to the Mallee Business Association (MBA).
This project has received funding from the Department of Human Services Youth-led COVID-19 Recovery Grants and administered by the Local Government Association of South Australia.