Non-formale kommunale Bildungsräume für bildungsbenachteiligte Jugendliche neu denken

The pandemic has exacerbated the situation, especially for young people in difficult life situations. To ensure that these young people do not become the long-term losers of the pandemic, innovative non-formal learning and educational spaces must be created at the community level, where young people can experience their own skills and competencies and learn with and from each other in physical encounters. While multi-actor approaches have long been pursued in business and development cooperation, youth work has been rather hesitant. Even before the pandemic, it was clear how useful it is for different professions to work together synergistically in youth work. However, this also means that there must be a reconfiguration of the existing offers, in which different actors with different content-related and professional focuses and objectives are involved in the development and operationalization of the educational venues. The BAG KJS and Cluster of Education developed the project to visit examples of good practice, to exchange ideas and to identify success factors for multi-actor approaches.

Since 2019, the cities of Dortmund and Cluj have been in close exchange on the economic and political level. On the civil society level, however, there is a gap that we want to fill with this project, among others. Both cities face similar transformation challenges, with the corresponding implications for the people. At the same time, both Cluj and Dortmund have non-formal education spaces that are implemented by different actors, with different professions. The aim of the project was to visit these good practice approaches in order to get a better understanding of the challenges and the approaches of the partners in the context of policy learning. In addition, the project also aimed to initiate new collaborations and strengthen the transfer of knowledge and experience. This was very successful in the course of the project. The participants agreed to apply for a follow-up project in order to consolidate the exchange and strengthen the cooperation.

The first meeting in Dortmund served to get to know each other personally and to exchange information about current multi-actor projects. The German and Romanian delegations visited various Dortmund projects, including Nordwärts for upgrading the northern districts of the city, as well as initiatives for strengthening digital skills, vocational orientation and social innovation. Visits were made to TZDO, KitzDo for STEM education and the Digital Learning Factory campus, among others. In Cluj, the Regional Innovation Center, Cluj Innovation Park, and activities with schoolgirls and a rural NGO were visited. The goal of the meeting was to understand and promote inclusive and multicultural projects in the community. The 3rd meeting took place again in Dortmund. It is positive to point out that the project group has expanded again and actors from rural areas participated. In addition to visiting projects, the meeting focused on further work on content. The aim was to find out which possible next steps could be taken. In two workshops, the participants developed various project outlines for subsequent projects.

Outputs of the project are that, follow-up projects in the field of non-formal education are to be initiated. Partnerships are planned between the KitzDo, the Digital Workshop and two schools in the rural area of Cluj. Here, the experience of the German partners is to be used to create educational spaces that will serve as attractive "third places" to counteract the rural exodus, among other things. Another cooperation developed between the Youth Ring Dortmund and the youth network of Cluj. There was already a first youth exchange while the project was still running. A third project is to deal with the topic of migration. There are different needs and challenges in Cluj and Dortmund. In order to address these, the idea arose to bring together actors from both cities in order to build long-term and sustainable structures for the needs-based integration of the target groups. In Romania, labor migration to the West is leading to the recruitment of workers from other countries, similar to the guest worker model in Germany. This requires integration services. There should be an exchange between migration services and other relevant actors on capacity building.