Social inclusion in youth centers

Social Inclusion in Youth Centres was a 24-month Strategic Partnership which was financed by the Erasmus+ programme Youth in Action, between four partner organizations. We focused on factors that make young people aware of the importance of social exclusion and the inclusion of young people into today’s modern society, and we wanted to develop not only activities and tools for youth workers, but also to develop sustainable programme activity guidelines for youth centres and related organizations working with young people. In this project we are following the objectives of the EU Youth Strategy in the area of policy decisions in social inclusion. The project began with a kick-off meeting, which was the basis for the project. The purpose of the kick-off meeting was a joint overview of the project activities and the final preparation for our cooperation. The next step was to prepare an analysis of the current position in each country. In this analysis we wanted to take into account critical local environments where the challenges of social inclusion are perceived. The method of analysis was prepared by a narrower project team at the national level in each country. Within the framework of the Social Inclusion in Youth Centres project, we also made a study visit, with the purpose of viewing good practice in youth centres in Oldenburg (Germany). This provided us with insight into good practice in developing and implementing programme activities in the field of social inclusion. Armed with all the knowledge from the previous activities, we prepared a programme for international training for youth workers who are responsible for the development of programmes in youth centres, where they could develop regular programme content of their youth centre and minor project activities in the field of social inclusion. At the international training youth workers also developed pilot national training courses for transferring the acquired knowledge to other youth workers, and to test the activities for social inclusion to better understand where the social inclusion programme of particular youth centres should go and how. We completed the project with multiple events in each country intended for decision-makers, various organizations that encounter social exclusion issues, and heads of youth centres, with the purpose of commenting and adapting the draft of the strategy paper. Through all the activities the process of strategy development took place, based on the analysis in each country, methods and insight into the concrete content, and the successful programme content of the youth centres in each country. All this enabled us to prepare a long-term sustainable strategy for programme development in youth centres and other related organizations in the field of social inclusion, and as a help for youth workers and youth centre leaders, how to deal with the challenges of social exclusion in the local community and how to effectively respond to them. We developed strategic guidelines that will enable youth centres to develop programme activities in the field of social inclusion, and, more precisely, how to develop programme content for the programme plan in youth centres.