ABC of Youth Work Good practice example

Project »ABC of Youth Work« project managed to make a big step forward to the quality of youth work in the European Union and in the field of encouraging young people to participate in groups and keep groups strong and growing in youth organisations. We payed special attention to young people with fewer opportunities: migrants and unemployed. The abbreviation “ABC” in the project title symbolises the need for youth work to return to its basics and foundations. The base assumption of the project was that youth work needs to return to its fundamental principles in order to maintain its position in the society: opening the space for young people as well as constructing bridges between the worlds of youth and adults. Youth work has been under increasingly large pressures of achieving qualitative and quantitative indicators and standards, and under harsh demands for delivering intersectoral impact. Nowadays, indicators in respect to various youth policies (e.g. health improvement of youth or reduction of youth unemployment) are prevailing. On the other side, lack of reflection on the importance of one of key elements of youth work - the group can be noticed. Project paid at most attention to “groups” and working in them. The project group developed two innovative tools in order to raise the quality of youth work through: better ways of encouraging young people to participate and keeping groups strong and growing: 1) Quality system: The Youth Work Growth Cycle was written especially for management of youth organisation. Its aim is to monitor organisational cultures in youth organisations to become more participatory and based on verified methodologies that work. 2) Manual »ABC of Youth Work - How to work with groups in the changing world?«. It target group are youth leaders and workers. It was written with the hypothesis that environment where young people are growing is constantly changing. Main factors of change in modern society were developments of mobile communications and mass migrations. Due to this structural changes youth workers need new competencies that have not yet been included into the majority of youth work educational systems. For designing both tools and reaching project aim the project group prepared also: - a desk research: »Young people in digital era and youth work«, - 30 interviews with youth leaders/workers and 8 focus groups (4 aimed at young people with less opportunities) - 20 case studies, from which each one picture one of processes defined in the quality system, - pilot curriculum of a 4-day training course about leadership and group dynamics for youth leaders/workers, from with each individual 1-day module was tested, - mentorship scheme for key staff of youth organisations: It represents the path for a mentor (or a person with a similar profile) to follow and thus present Quality system and help organisation to improve the quality of their youth work.