About the program

The Shared Futures Youth Programme is a pioneering social innovation initiative aimed at empowering young people and the wider community build positive futures together. Through its pioneering “future building” programme and learning resources it will give young people and the wider community the knowledge, tools, and skills necessary to increase economic resilience, social wellbeing, and environmental sustainability in their lives and areas.

For this purpose, it uses original “future building” learning resources including a video game introducing young people to the social economy, a local version of Minecraft encouraging them to virtually reimagine their areas (including the peace walls dividing them), and an online educational community space for ideas sharing. Once completed, they will have the direct opportunity to apply this knowledge and these skills for delivering transformative good relations projects via our new “Share Futures” online platform. The ultimate aim is to draw on these social innovation perspectives to help to break down barriers and bring communities together in a way that is forward thinking rather than backward looking.

The program Tools

SFYP has a number of carefully customised tools

Virtual Futures Game

Virtual futures is a computer game that simulate a life in a world where Social Economy solutions are implemented in the form of separate buildings such as a FabLab (shared workshop with 3D Printers), Social Economy centre (recycling and learning), Social Garden (learning, planting, harvesting), social kitchen, and other buildings.

Each building will have an assistant presenting the building and its activities to the player, with some interactive activities that resemble how such building is used in real life.

This tool is very useful to teach the player on the different possibilities to implement social economy in life. Such knowledge would then be used to inform the later stages of the program where the participants will plan changes to their areas based on the ideas they learned about in this game.

Interactive Map

This is an online real map similar to Google maps, but this one is less real life and more interactive game like map with interactive moving objects such as cars and planes. In the map, you will find multiple saved locations categorised by their nature such as tourism, education, etc.

The map is supposed to help users look for social economy implementations that exist in their city and surrounding areas. Users can look the different social economy initiations by their category and learn about each location by reading its overview and accessing its website. This tool would fit perfectly in scoping any social economy initiatives in the world to see how the buildings learned in Virtual Futures exist in real world. This would enhance the learning about social economy implementations and will further help the participant forming their ideas to suggest in later stages of the program.

Minecraft

Minecraft is one of the most popular games around the world and is the most streamed game in history. It is one of the rare games played widely be players of all ages. Its concept is that many players exist in a 3D world (3D map) and are able to interact with their surrounding to build stuff. We have created a dedicated Minecraft server for this project with multiple worlds that are populated from real life maps from Northern Ireland reflecting real locations in different cities that look a bit futuristic. Players would work alone or in groups to cocreate, build, and reimagine their areas implementing project based on the knowledge they have acquired from the previous tools and discussions about social economy and the different implementations possibilities.

Players would meet at the beginning of every session and will be given a printed map of the world they will be playing in, the server will be set to a world reflecting a known location for the players, normally in the area they live in. The players would learn how to play the game by navigating its using an attached leaflet (link here) (to be printed) explaining the game controls and the quest for the world (example link here).

Mozilla Hub

Mozilla hubs is an online platform that is very similar to Virtual Futures where the players find themselves in a virtual word with multiple existing social economy buildings. However, the main difference is that Mozilla Hubs is an online platform that in addition to a virtual tour, it also allows for multiple users to be in the same world with full text and audio communication enabled in addition to access to online materials such as videos that explain each building. Players would normally use headphones and microphones while playing to avoid noise and sound feedback between the different players.

Weekly Program

Pelase see our suggested weekly schedule below
This is a suggested programme only
Feel free to edit and mix and match the programme based on your needs
We are always happy to help with suggestions

Week	Tool	Activity Overview
Week 1	Introduction	Week 1 Files
Week 2	Virtual Futures	Week 2 Files
Week 3	Virtual Futures & Interactive Map	Weekl 3 Files
Week 4	Mozilla Hubs	Week 4 Files
Week 5	Minecraft	Week 5 Files
Week 6	Minecraft	Week 6 Files
Week 7	Minecraft	Week 7 Files
Week 8	Reflection	Weekly Plan