The EU – CoE youth partnership, in co-operation with in co-operation with the Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Youth, with SALTO SEE Resource Centre and with the Regional Youth Cooperation Office (RYCO) organises on 13 to 15 November a peer-learning seminar on youth work. This is as an opportunity to deepen the discussion on the state of youth work in the region and to promote a wide range of European support instruments, mechanisms and tools.
Building on developments in the region, the activity aims to make a contribution to strengthening youth work in the region, by analysing its state of play and identifying the support needed from youth work policy, and in turn will consider the crucial role that youth work can play in supporting youth policy at different levels.
The seminar objectives are:
- to strengthen the knowledge about youth work in South East Europe;
- to explore current challenges and needs that youth work as a field has in SEE and how youth policy can respond to them, at different levels, through frameworks, capacity building, and support tools;
- to enhance synergies between different relevant actors in the region for the development of the youth work sector;
- to analyse the crucial role that youth work can play in supporting youth policy at different levels.
The event will gather up to 50 participants, representing the triangle of youth work practice, policy and research.
Background information
Increasing knowledge and supporting the development of youth work and youth policy in SEE has been for several years one of the objectives of the EU-CoE youth partnership. In this framework, the EU-CoE youth partnership organised in 2016 the peer-learning seminar ‘Getting Across’, which brought together 55 participants involved in youth policy and youth work, particularly in the Western Balkans. The event reaffirmed the role of youth work in supporting young people in exclusion situations and generated guidelines for increasing the quality and impact of cross-sectoral youth policies and youth services.
From 2017 onwards, EU-CoE youth partnership has carried out a research project on the educational paths of youth workers, which aims to collect data and analyse the formal and non-formal education paths and career steps of youth workers, as contribution to the quality development in the youth work field.
Moreover, youth work is today very prominent in the priorities and processes of the Council of Europe and of the European Commission.
Slovenia, furthermore, has established, over the years, a strong youth sector and a well-developed cooperation within South-East Europe in different policy areas affecting youth, while its Office for Youth has been fond of deepening regional cooperation in the field of youth, contributing to the implementation of the Council of Europe Recommendation on youth work.
