Fatherhood

Background Our partnership applied for this project recognizing the unmet need for support and training for young fathers in their parenting roles. Despite a growing desire among fathers to be more involved in their children's upbringing, they often feel unsupported and lack necessary training. The idea for the project stemmed from a young father's realization of this need and his initiative to gather content for a documentary on fatherhood. Partnering social enterprises, focusing on community group training, joined in with the hypothesis that today's fathers seek greater involvement but lack support. The project aimed to objectively explore young fathers' needs through GAP analysis across partner countries and develop a training program and open educational resources (OERs). Quasar's ongoing work on the Fatherhood documentary aims to promote gender equality in parenting roles, while other partners continue to utilize developed OERs and Fatherhood videos in their training programs. Objectives The main objective of the project is to develop outputs that empower young fathers to actively engage in parenting roles. To reach this objective the partnership felt that further analysis was needed reflecting as well upon cultural and societal differences between countries about the fatherhood role. Based upon insights gathered from this phase of the project partners wanted to develop training and open educational resources that could be used both within their organizations, by stakeholders and for self-learning. They created content for wider dissemination through the production of the Fatherhood videos including interviews with young fathers on their lived experience and professionals about research and practitioners’ insights into fatherhood and empowerment of fathers. Partners' foresight is to further exploit and develop project results in their content production (documentary or short docs), community work, and training with different groups of fathers like fathers with migrant backgrounds as well as good practice in international collaborations. Implementation Internal activities occur within the partnership including transnational project meetings (3) and online meetings (10), management (budget, process, dissemination, and quality assurance), and reporting. External activities are focused on fathers/stakeholders such as training, multiplier events, public promotion, and dissemination. Pilot training of Open Educational Resources (OERs) including filming interviews with fathers took place in Greece in May 2022. Multiplier events (MEs) were held in all countries at the end of the project promoting project intellectual outputs as well as all partners took part in the final conference implemented simultaneously in Iceland and Ireland. Partners sustained value-adding networks throughout project implementation and post-project finalization disseminating project results as well as transferring project results to a network of fathers in China. Partners presented project results at different stages in a project leaflet and 4 newsletters in English and partner languages for local dissemination. Fatherhood videos were published both on the project website and YouTube as well as Facebook and LinkedIn pages were set up and partners used their own websites/social-media for local dissemination. Achievements The Fatherhood project was divided into 4 intellectual outputs that were implemented in the project: - GAP analysis in partner countries including a desk research and situational analysis, online survey answered by 360 fathers, 20 qualitative semi-structured interviews with young fathers, and 22 with professionals on fatherhood and parenting roles. A comparative report was published on these results, a network of fathers/professionals emerged in each country then took part in other project outputs. - Fatherhood empowerment training was developed building on the GAP analysis results presenting 6 modules with a focus both on practical and emotional topics or communication, self-esteem, child development, positive parenting, healthy family habits, and schools & father engagement. Each module was composed of the theoretical module, 3 practical activities, and 3 good practices. Pilot training was conducted in Aegean in Greece in May 2022 including 14 fathers from different partner countries. - Fatherhood videos include interviews with 14 fathers promoting their lived experience and 11 professionals. - Fatherhood training website and a platform in all partner languages, using Moodle software that can be applied in future trainings.