With help of the PINS project Association DrogArt renewed their informative harm reduction mobile application DrogApp. New concept of the application enables easier editing of the content for the organization and easier implementation of the application to be used by other organizations in other languages or also on other fields of working with young people, where part of the youth work is providing different information and knowledge about specific topics, in order to raise awareness and spread knowledge or information about it. It can be also used as a learning tool or educational support, when there’s a need for a youth worker to acces quickly to some specific information (in our case about drug harm reduction, but in other cases also about other relevant topic, not necessarily on the field of health or well-being).
Unity question quizzesAt Unity we work with short 4-5 multiple-choice question quizzes that visitors at the stand can fill in to test their knowledge. We have quizzes for most of the popular drugs like: speed, MDMA, 4-FA, ketamine, cannabis, alcohol, coke, psychedelics, etc.
One of the aims of PINS project was also to enhance key competences of the youth peer workers, included in the project. Evaluation team performed a systematic evaluation of gained knowledge and skills in two different groups. One was formed of peers attending learning mobiliy (training and intervention at Boom festival) and the other was evalution with group of seven peer representatives, who were included in the PINS more intensively. Below you can find the questiones we used in the (online) questionnaires and results of the evaluation.
Before the Boom intervention started, participants of the exchange took part of the international training, which was performed by different project partners, who are specialized in specific aspects of the intervention. Here you can read what we learned and how.
The Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) is a five-day electronic music conference and festival held annually in mid-October. The event is organized by The Amsterdam Dance Event Foundation and offers a full program of daytime conferences at ADE Pro, ADE Tech, HDE, ADE University, ADE Next, ADE Beamlab and ADE Green, alongside the nighttime ADE Festival which features 450 events and 2,200 artists over five days in 115 clubs and venues. The shows attract over 350,000 people from all over the world to the city, making Amsterdam one of the busiest clubbing cities in the world.
NEW IP was carried out between 2011 and 2013 by the community-based NGOs and the institutions involved in the BASICS Network and the DC&D Safer Nightlife Platform, the Nightlife Empowerment & Well-being Implementation Project (NEWIP) proposed specific responses to the new challenges in the fields of harm reduction and health promotion, using recreational settings as initial outreach locations.
During the NEW IP project intervention guidelines for international peers working together and good practice standards for peer education in nightlife settings were establish. It was a big help before preparing BOOM intervention for PINS project and will also be very useful for the future projects and interventions. Big thank you to all involved in NEW IP project for preparing and sharing the guidelines. You can find and use publications on the links below:
Intervention Guidelines for NEW IP Volunteers
Peer Education in Nightlife Settings – Good Practice Standards
Here is an instructions video on how to use reagents made by Energy Control
A short video in which we show how to set up a chill out zone at a dance party.
How to use questionnaires in drug harm reduction education video by Safe’n sound (Belgium).
How to hold effective and efficient meetings by Unity for the PINS project.
In PINS project Druscouts prepared special awareness campaign called Audio Flyer Project. The idea was to put information also in audio version, not only written one and to approach with information to youngsters, who don’t cannot read, because of their disabilities or simply don’t want to read that much. After preparation of the content and recording it, simple audio flyers are here, you can listen to them in German language on their website and they are all collected on their Soundcloud profile, with also bunch of other interesting content:
For the BOOM intervention we prepared info material in a form of info cards. We took the idea from Crew2000, where they use those cards on lanyards. There are many cards each one for different substance or other harm reduction topic. The design for most of them was also made by Crew2000, for BOOM needs we add some new ones (LSD, mental health, Amphetamine, Basic life support). The idea behind was, that people who came to our info stand pick the cards they have interest in and pin them together with a book ring as you can see on the picture. Read more
In order to have new and inovative info material on Boom festival, we took a good practice from Energy Control, where they are distributing cooling fans made our of carton on parties and festivals. We tried to take into account all the most important harm reduction messages in connection to Boom festival. So we decided for the following harm reduction messages which are vital for hot and dry enviroment as it is on Boom festival: