Consultant on Media Literacy at Europe Foundation

Europe Foundation invites proposals from qualified organizations or individual/s to conduct a virtual training on Media Literacy for youth engaged in the Foundation’s Youth Integration Program. The objective of the training is to hone the participants’ skills in accessing, critically assessing, and creating media content, to make their social and civic activism more effective. Europe Foundation expects this assignment to be conducted between June-July 2021, depending upon the availability of the selected consultant/s.

About Europe Foundation

Europe Foundation’s mission is to empower people to effect change for social justice and economic prosperity through hands-on programs, helping them to improve their communities and their own lives. To achieve its mission, Europe Foundation strives to strengthen the capacity of individuals and institutions, empowering them to address pressing issues and to mobilize relevant stakeholders in issue-based dialogue, through raising public awareness and creating various coalitions, platforms or working groups, so as to effect positive change.

Program Background Information

The Europe Foundation’s Youth Integration Program strives to increase youth volunteerism and civic engagement to address targeted communities’ needs. The Foundation employs the Youth Bank (YB) methodology, an innovative way of increasing youth participation through creating groups of young people (aged 15-21) in a given community and empowering them with training and resources to find, fund, and oversee small youth-led initiatives that address salient for local communities’ issues. The YB concept is founded on the premise that involving young people in projects they design and manage is the most potent way to develop civic participation among youth. The uniqueness of the YB model is that young people are given the opportunity to independently undertake all the activities involved in the YB grantmaking cycle without constant supervision from adults. Each year, the YBs fund roughly 110 local youth-led initiatives in their communities, which could address needs as diverse as cleaning a community park through promoting gender equality to preparing first-time voters for elections. Currently, the Program covers the following towns and communities: Adjara, Akhalkalaki, Akhmeta, Aspindza, Bolnisi, Chokhatauri, Dedophlistskaro, Gagra, Gali, Gardabani, Gori, Gulripshi, Gudauta, Khobi, Khoni, Marneuli, Ochamchire, Poti, Racha, Svaneti, Sokhumi, Tkibuli, Tserovani, Tsalka and Zemo Barghebi.

Training Module

Europe Foundation adheres to the widespread belief that MIL education is necessary to empower youth and adults to become critical thinkers, effective communicators, and active citizens. The objective of the training is to create an active stance toward consuming and creating media content among the participants. The learning objective of the training is to help the participants in becoming wiser consumers of media and to equip them with skills and tools necessary to utilize the media responsibly.

The training module should focus on two questions that form the basis of media literacy – who created the message and what is its intent. By the end of the training the participants should be able to understand the differences in media outlets, the messages they disseminate, and ethical methods for producing their own media content. They should improve their critical analysis skills, including the ability to identify sources and purpose, the capacity to examine the media techniques and genres, and the competence to detect propaganda or bias, as well as to understand the reasons behind the detected bias. The training should use an inquiry-based pedagogic model, focus more on strengthening the process skills rather than the content knowledge. It is important that the training involves examples from more contemporary sources, to which the participants can relate to, given their age, background, language skills, etc.

Europe Foundation expects the task to be completed by the end of June 2021. At any point, Europe Foundation can virtually gather up to 90 young people for not more than a five-day-long activity, as long as the Consultant(s) can suggest a methodology, which envisions online and offline activities for all trainees. The offline activities may include individual or group activities that will allow the youth to utilize the media literacy skills in practice. This said, Europe Foundation is open to any suggestions, especially regarding the timeline, from the Consultant(s), as long as the training is completed on time and the suggested workplan is not associated with excessive spending.

Timeframe and Deliverables

Expected duration of the assignment is four weeks.

The consultant(s) should produce the following deliverables:

1. Design a module for a virtual training that will take place over the course of maximum 5 days with each session lasting no longer than 4 hours;
2. Develop new training materials and handouts to be used by the Consultant during the virtual training and by the trained young people during their outreach work;
3. Conduct a virtual training for 90 youth;
4. Final report, which will include the following sections:
5. Brief description of the goal and objectives of the training.
6. Outcomes of the training, including reflections on the training methodology.
7. Recommendations.
8. Annexes, including the training program, etc.

The report will be the sole property of Europe Foundation, which will retain the right to use it for internal and external purposes.

Consultant Qualifications

Europe Foundation expects that the selected consultant(s) will have extensive knowledge of and experience in the field of the media literacy education, including the design and delivery of MIL trainings to youth.

Additional qualification requirements for the trainers include:

• Advanced degree in media, communications, or related field
• Excellent presentation and interpersonal communications skills
• Ability to work independently

Timeframe

Proposal submission deadline: June 20, 2021 18:00 Tbilisi time (GMT+4).

The deadline for the completion of the trainings and submission of the report: July 30, 2021 18:00 Tbilisi time (GMT+4).

Budget

The consultant should provide a detailed budget to Europe Foundation for providing the training services. The budget should not exceed USD 4,500.