Nowadays it is close to impossible to imagine our lives without digital applications which form an all-pervasive part of our everyday lives. However, there is a group of people that seems to have been left out of these trends and finds itself in the so-called „digital vacuum“ with little to no digital access and literacy. We are talking here about incarcerated citizens returning from their prison sentence back to society. Their prolonged isolation from the life in the general society has excluded them from the latest trends rendering them unprepared for the life in society after prison. As a result  their first steps after incaceration are often charcterized by insecurity due to a lack of personal resources, mostly in the form of soft skills, digital literacy and, of course, the very basic personal and material background that many of take for granted.  

Since the problem of reintegration into society is complex it requires the collaboration of many professionals and services. The FORSA application which was created by Bureau Maatschappelijk Herstel en Rehabilitatie (BMHR) in the Netherlands tries to address at least some its challenges combining the use of a digital tool with the development of soft skills which as mentioned above are mostly deficient with this target group. Designed during the corona crisis it aimed to establish and maintain communication between people returing from prison to society and their guiding professionals in the strick social distancing conditions of the pandemic crisis focusing mostly on areas such as job seeking, accommodation or debt management. With the retreat of the COVID 19 the creators of the FORSA app wanted to expand their application. By  adding new content and features they aimed to  broaden the scope of tools and sevices available to returning citizens via this app.

This challenge has been addressed in the Dutch-Slovak international ERASMUS + project Navigating reitegration through microlearing that combines the technological tools and innovations provided  by the Dutch partners and the long-term experience with social training of incarcerated individuals of the Slovak NGO Consultation and Information Center EDUKOS (KIC EDUKOS).  The result of this project collaboration is an expanded versions of the FORSA application that contains four modules of soft skills development as practiced by KIC EDUKOS and modified for the use in the digital environment. The ambition of the application is to give its users a foretaste of what soft skils are about, what it takes to develop them and eventually inspire them to take part in a physical in-person soft skills training in the future. For those that have already participated in an in-person training it offers an opportunity to revise what they have already learned. The fact that all of this is provided through a digital tool helps them become more familiar with the digital environment and thereby lessen their digital illiteracy and insecurity in dealing with such tools in other areas of life. 

A pilot testing is soon to be launched in Slovakia with clients of the probation services to see to what degree the newly integrated content and digital features are user friendly relative to this specific target group and so prepare the application for its future extensive use both in Slovakia and the Netherlands.

Organizations or professionals interested in the application or in exploring partnership opportunities for further development are warmly invited to get in touch via info@bureaumhr.nl or edukos@edukos.sk 

🎥 Watch the short introduction video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fnd7iU_0_s&list=PLLcTTf-WjyU-chnNs2F8HQsYPj285eWv9

This work FORSA is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International