YOUTH 4 SOCIAL CHANGE - Training Young Change Agents for Healthy & Active Local Communities

The concept of a healthy lifestyle gains immense traction. This is because most of mortality is due to non-communicable diseases. Yet only a small proportion of youth fully meet the recommendations for physical activity. And the Covid-19 pandemic made this even worse. Therefore, we need more stimulation for an active and healthy lifestyle. Yet we should not follow political agendas without recognizing the demands from youth: Studies conclude that for most youth, health awareness is an important value. And more youngsters seek to engage in local decision making. Yet, the most important value is personal responsibility. Therefore, we see the need to capitalize on these motivations to actively shape the youngsters’ future from a global perspective but at local level. A prerequisite for engagement is that youth need the skills, resources, and competencies to get involved in civil society. They need to develop these skills with their peers in a social arena in which they can effectively contribute in a leading position. Instead of pre-identifying solutions for them, they need to build capacity to engage with their local community, identify challenges that they deem important, and cocreate innovative solutions that really work for them.

Youth for Social Change aimed at engaging youngsters in the development of their local communities by training them as change agents for an active and healthy lifestyle. Plus, we aimed at training youth workers to become mentors to support the young change agents across their capacity-building processes. Together they were empowered to kickstart and lead a youth-driven local community of practice approach that resulted in small-scale healthy lifestyle initiatives co-created with local community stakeholders. With it, we aimed at building on the self-motivation of the youngsters, complementing existing local youth work structures, and to enrich the range of local health offers. At the same time, we aimed to contribute to the capacity building of the youngsters through innovative empowerment and co-learning approaches, and to provide them with the skills, knowledge and self-efficacy to take leading roles in local level action-planning. With it, our aim was to magnify youth voices, and to develop confidence and adequate skill sets to open further avenues for civic engagement, plus to enrich the European landscape of youth work with new ideas and approaches.

To develop an improved understanding about how to engage youngsters and how to support an active and healthy lifestyle by youth work at local community level, we applied a human-centred design together with complexity-oriented design principles. This combined methodology for innovation engages people to understand their preferences and to create collective ownership. It was specifically applicable for developing training approaches and resources that match the needs of the target groups of youngsters and youth workers, plus for then developing youth-driven local co-creation environments that serve the needs and assets of the diverse local community stakeholders. In the centre of our activities was the development of an innovative concept that combines an approach towards social change for an active and healthy lifestyle through youth-driven local communities of practice together with a unique sport for development approach for youth empowerment. Both were substantiated by applicable learning theories and a holistic approach to a healthy lifestyle, which are applicable for day-to-day youth work practice.

Our activities resulted in the implementaion of four local change agent and mentor training events, plus, two combined international training activities for change agents and change mentors. We facilitated local youth-driven communities of practice and co-created applied healthy lifestyle activities in each of our municipalities. From this, we developed a shared frame of reference, plus needs and assets assessment reports to analyze the local situation in our local communities. We developed a change agent training concept to facilitate local co-creation environments and to foster healthy lifestyle, plus a mentoring manual for youth workers to support youngsters in their role as change agents. We co-created a variety of learning resources ranging from small games to open training events, to more complex workshop facilitation activities. Plus, we developed action agendas for implementing small-scale local healthy lifestyle initiatives. With it, our virtual learning space and toolbox provides several hundred pages of information ranging from concepts to manuals, quick guides and fact sheets, to workshop resources and learning materials. Finally, to promote and validate our approaches, we implemented five multiplier events.