How to encourage elder adult educators and seniors themselves to be creative? How to involve them in artistic and creative recycling and upcycling experiences and in life-long learning? And how to equip them with necessary knowledge and skills to become senior entrepreneurs?

These are the topics we focus on with our new project “Creative Seniors – Be Active, Be Artist, Inspire Others” (2023-1-LT01-KA220-ADU-000155789). The partners are: VSI EDUKACINIAI PROJEKTAI (EDUPRO) from Lithuania, Creativity and Educational Studio “ARTIED” from Bulgaria, L’associació del Taller Baix Camp from Spain, ASSET BASILICATA – Azienda speciale della Camera di Commercio della Basilicata from Italy and Community Development Institute (CDI) from the Republic of North Macedonia.

The project’s overall objective is to create opportunities for active ageing and socialisation of elders (60+) through artistic and creative upcycling experiences and involvement in life-long learning and community led activities. This way we want to encourage elder adult educators and seniors themselves to be creative, to equip them with necessary knowledge and skills to become peer-to-peer educators and change agents and to inspire them to turn their artistic and craft activities into entrepreneurship endeavours.

During the project we will:

1. Create a digital Compass with 2 sections:

• SECTION 1) Specifics of teaching elder people in different learning settings and formats, how to engage them as senior peer-to-peer educators and how to involve seniors in artistic and craft activities and in creative recycling and upcycling.
• SECTION 2) Basics of an entrepreneurship initiative and how to become a senior entrepreneur.

2. Form local promotion teams in all partner countries and organise an International training of senior peer-to-peer educators to present the developed Compass, to motivate the involved active seniors and elder adult educators to become change agents and role models and to brainstorm ideas about practical activities to be included in a Catalogue with art and craft and recycling and upcycling activities suitable for seniors.
3. Create a digital Catalogue with art and craft and recycling and upcycling activities suitable for seniors and organise national workshops during which seniors will be able to put in practice the proposed activities. Some of the activities might include: making artistic collages out of natural materials, easy craft activities, creative recycling, making easy decorations with recycled materials, making drawings / sketches with natural materials (herbs, coffee, etc), working with natural materials (foliage, stones, plants, wooden parts, etc). Video recordings of the workshops will be done and a video book “From Creative Seniors to Creative Seniors” will be developed to form the practical part of the Catalogue.
4. Organise local fairs/exhibitions with the works from the national workshops and an EU-level digital exhibition about creative and empowered seniors, as well as local multiplier events in all partner countries to present the project results, outputs, outcomes and achievements.

For more information, please check our Facebook profile and the project website at https://www.creativeseniors.eu/.

The project “Creative Seniors – Be Active, Be Artist, Inspire Others” (2023-1-LT01-KA220-ADU-000155789) is co-funded by the Erasmus + Programme of the EU, through the Lithuanian National Agency.

  2023-1-LT01-KA220-ADU-000155789 

This project has been co-funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.