What is DisArTY?
The DisArTY (Restoring Disaster Area through Community Based Tourism Youth-Led) is an Erasmus+ Capacity Building project for Youth. It aims to promote the cooperation between Europe, Latin America and Asia in the field of community based tourism and explore the potential of youth work. The goal is to increase social entrepreneurship and employability of young people which can be an important tool for restoring areas damaged by natural disasters.
The project is going to be implemented by a consortium that includes 5 partners from 2 European countries (Italy, Greece), 1 Asian (Philippines) and 1 Latin American country (Mexico). Action Synergy participates in the project as a partner. The project is coordinated by RAS Foundation from Italy.
Aims of DisArTY:
The project aims to facilitate countries affected by natural disasters to develop strategies to guarantee the recovery of their human activity. These strategies will be based on community-based youth-led activities as they involve the communities that control, manage and develop their own tourism industry and represent a sector in which specially young people have an important role to play as the most dynamic and innovative part of this field.
What is Community Based Tourism?
Community-based tourism has been promoted as a means of development whereby the social, environmental and economic needs of local communities are met through the offering of a tourism product. Local culture may be a community’s most valuable asset for tourism if planned and managed properly. Its intangible cultural heritage may provide the community with a competitive advantage and uniqueness, one that differentiates it from all other communities. However, with increasing commodification of tourism, many smaller rural communities face several challenges in developing community-based tourism.
The activities:
The project activities will be based on the research and development of Best Practices with local community assets that can be used in order to achieve sustainable tourism. As a result, our goal is to benefit local communities of disaster areas. In order to promote this objective, DisArTY project will organize four main activity clusters:
First, research on the principles and best practices related with community based tourism with local youth. This research will also include the identification of valuable local assets that can be used for a tourism related product in each of the local communities that the partners are going to focus their activities on.
Second, the enhancement of skills and competencies of youth workers in the field of community based tourism and youth entrepreneurship within the framework of three international exchanges in Italy, Mexico and Philippines.
Third, the development of innovative community based tourism offers at local level with active involvement of youth workers, many with few opportunities and/or hit or threatened by unemployment caused by the disaster.
Fourth, the creation of networks and information for entrepreneurial training, business plan development, and community based social entrepreneurship. It will include the development of material for an e-learning course designed towards youth workers as well as a new platform with contacts of entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship tutors.
It is expected that more than 100 youth workers from all the partners are going to be involved in the activities of the project both through the participation in the transnational training events and the participation in the e-learning course that the project is going to develop.