Project Goals
During one year the project had two training courses and the final conference open to youth workers and community leaders of 10 communities aimed to:
- further professionalize youth workers by making them experience and reflect on innovative methods and tools which they can acquire and use to foster youth participation in their respective communities;
- foster the bottom-up development of youth participation action plans based on evidence and experience of participants using four thematic clusters of participation as a theoretical framework;
- enable project participants to learn best practices of the speakers related to participation;
- provide participants with the opportunity to present the youth participation action plans developed in the frame of the project and receive feedback from experts so as to improve these.
Target Groups
The project organizers clustered 4 major constraints to youth participation: 1. participation and legal status; 2. participation and gender; 3. participation and educational background; 4. participation and religion.
Based on the 4 clusters, the project improves competences of youth workers, trainers, youth leaders, youth policy makers and other community leaders, thus increasing the involved NGOs' capacities to reach out and empower youth not engaging in social and political life.
Activities
In the frame of the project, 10 NGOs from 10 EU countries have jointly worked on enhancing the impact of the youth work on youth participation at a local level. Two training courses of 16 training days length in total were open to 80 youth workers and community leaders of 10 communities.
The final event of “Youth participation in Europe: the way of E+ Youth-Activizenship” gathered 40 participants, their organisations and experts in the field of participation from international organisations, governments and civil society. Experts and participants discussed the project results, best practices related to participation as well as challenges and opportunities for social and political engagement of young Europeans.
The participants have also developed and presented action plans aiming to raise the level of youth participation at local level across communities of the 10 EU-MS of the project partners by addressing major constraints to youth participation related to legal status, gender, and educational background and culture/religion.
