<< Background >>Our approach is engaging, connecting and empowering youth by acting upon youth’s shared values to foster civic engagement and participation, thus promoting innovative practices in local youth work and contribute to the further recognition of youth work. Focusing our proposal on our local youth work and feedback received from our target groups. Engage: Following the study by Yael Ohana on the political dimension of youth work, the concept of participation today has changed to short term commitment to meaningful and tangible causes, against a long term commitment to a general idea which characterised the past. A minority of young people are members of youth organisations who claim to be the key speakers of all European youths. Community Organising refers to local issues, tangible and visible, creates a solution oriented thought in a timely manner and the attitude to activate to implement those solutions. In Alinsky’s theory the community organiser should be a community’s outsider with an external view, help build the community and slowly step out handing over the process to the community, and such a role fits perfectly to a youth worker.Connect: Community Organising means tacking communities which are subject to injustice and organise them to identify among themselves the resources to accomplish justice and fairness, in other words Community here is a synonym to solidarity. The approach is that there is more that unites us than divides us, focusing on the common issues and solutions that can be achieved through unity, mutual support and resource-sharing, building and rebuilding communities in the aftermath of the global pandemic with an extra gear.Empower: Build on the competences of youth workers to act as community leaders, coaches, organisers, provide innovative leadership and organisational competences, and building literature and evidence around that in order to allow them to act locally as community organisers and in turn empower the target group, as a wheel in motion, the consortium professionals empower youth workers until they can independently support and organise youth communities, until the latter is enabled and empowered to autonomously carry out selfdirected community organising.Civic Engagement and Participation, many European institutions and public bodies are pointing fingers at the political disenfranchisement of youth, often because of the failure of political actors to address issues which are relevant and important to youth, being avoided or tokenized. Community Organising offers the means for youth communities to create their own political agenda in the direction of what really matters and what change is within reach in a spirit of service towards the improvement of local democracy and participation.Recognition of Youth Work, will be a side effect of the whole effort, once youth work has brought the practice of Community Organising to marginalised and unorganised youth communities, constructively and democratically engaging them, there where are failed past attempts on behalf of pubic bodies and local authorities, the essential partnership youth workers - authorities will be even more tangible as bringer of value-based education, democracy-fostering principles and actions, and enhancement of the youth’s sense of belonging to both local realities, its issues and its solutions.Therefore our choice of priorities will lead us to accomplish our target, that of creating linear, shared and molecular leadership among : migrant communities in Milan's Hinterland, local informal youth organisations in Bulgaria, unorganised and marginalised youth communities in Tuzla, informal youths in Constanta, and rural youths in Catalunya.<< Objectives >>We are in a context of a massive global pandemic threatening the fabric of our society. Increased connectivity increase social media reliance and its algorithms and targeting strategies are fostering the creation of bubbles often polarised, if not radicalised, on strong opposing views and rise of hatred and frustration. That topped with loneliness, isolation, especially for young people as concepts such as school or sports communities have almost collapsed, insecurities and uncertainties towards the future have increased, adding to the burden of the stress created by the pandemic situation. This even more true regarding our above mentioned target groups, as online hoaxes, conspiracytheories and hate speech have steadily increased since, and on top of that, the targeted communities were already among the socially and economically vulnerable groups and the economic depression we are witnessing now has badly hit their households and future perspectives. We are going to work in this challenging context in order to accomplish the following objectives:1) Provide youth workers with competences on coaching, community leadership and community organising, to foster action, participation, citizenship among groups of disadvantaged youths. Enhancing local leadership and organisation of the community.2) Identify and understand challenges within the community along with local leadership, empower them to gain followers and create other leaders in turn and foster action and dialogue within the community.3) Create a parallel empowerment and learning process to digitalise community organising learning and processes. As well as creating digital learning materials for the replication of the effort, and showcase the recognition of the role of Youth Community Organiser by the general public and relevant authorities.4) Impact local youth groups by implementing community organising practices aimed at finding local solutions to local challenges and implement them ,Context:1) today much of youth work focuses on youth leadership of initiatives, training, mentoring and counseling/therapy, Coaching competences are still rare, yet very accessible to youth workers, and the ability to operate outside of the of the youth NGO is not as strong as it could be, especially inthe youth sector’s resistance to tackle the political dimension of youth work.2) Eurostat : 25% of European youth is at risk of poverty due to the economic aftermath of COVID, numbers concern youth 16-30 at risk of becoming NEETs. A significant collapse of youth’s faith in democratic institutions reduced to 30%, and a decrease of support in civil society organisations.These are solid grounds for our project to bridge the gap of faith between youth - public - third sector by empowering grassroot solutions, and fostering solidarity and sense of belonging.3) Much of the formal and nonformal learning nowadays has been digitalised and slowly entering the sphere of normality, needs also to be said that youth workers were among the first to fastly adapt to this situation combining digital and nonformal education. Therefore a digital learning platform on community organising will likely receive more feedback and interaction now rather than in pre-covid times.4) All our realities witnessed a collapse in participation and sense of community belonging in the last year, which was already in decline, according to Eurostat 2019 youth 15-25 by approximately 51% showed for the first time a pessimist view on the future and their opportunities, here we point at the lack of confidence and fears of being too small and weak to make a difference and our process aims at reversing that obstacle by empowering and guiding towards making a tangible, realistic and achievable difference locally, as a first step and milestone into accomplishing the best desired future.<< Implementation >>1) 3 international residential training courses on: Coaching youth leadership, Community Organising and on youth leadership and leadership styles. These trainings aim at building the competenes of 4 youth workers/leaders from each reality (total 20), to become community organisers by becoming leadership coaches to identify and construct leadership within the locally unorganised community, learn about community organising and gain training/mentor competenes to enhance, build and empower both leadership and organisation locally among local youth target groups. 2) organise 5 communities and 5 local campaigns on community organising. the 20 trained participants are expected to implement a local community organising campaign after each training, to identify local leadership, strengthen and empower it, organise the youth community around a local shared issue and solution, and empower the leaders to take over the campaign through solution-finding, networking, advocacy and dialogue with 3d sector and public actors. Looking at the creation of minimum 50 local community leaders. 3) 2 webinar on organisational management and nonviolent direct action. The webinars intend to bring together the participants in the international mobilities and local leaders, with the purpose on providing concrete skills on action planning and organisational management, including digital co-creation and working spaces as well as sharing in between the 5 engaged realities. 4) 4 International Steering Group Meetings : That includes 2 representatives per each partner meeting at 3 statutory meetings (kick-off, mid-term evaluation, closing and final evaluation) and an editorial meeting of the communication staff of each partner to adopt a joint dissemination and visibility strategy and implement it. 5) 1 MOOC on Community Organising: This aims to be the main output, an online course inspired by the youth work MOOC and the Harvard Digital Course on Community Organising, that will embed a full length course to gain community organiser competences, in English and subtitled in all the languages of the project, aiming at being prototyped with 100 to 200 people by the end of the project. 6) 2 manuals on Community Organiing and Youth Community Leadership: These manuals will capitalise on the training's content and showcase the actions and community organising carried out by all partners, as guidebooks to understand what is community organising and how it is adapted to the European youth work context and how this can be replicated, as the output will be available in all the languages of the project. 7) 15 multiplier events (3 in each reality) The multiplier events will showcase the outcomes and results of the project, recruit participants form the MOOC, as well as showing local communities the youth opportunities offered by the EU. The final one, launching of the organised community, will be the handover from the partnership to the communities of all outputs and results.<< Results >>The main result to achieve is that we accomplish to engage, connect and empower youth communities into becoming organised and able to identify within themselves leadership and resources to bring about positive and democratic change to the issues they are facing, and enable significant civic engagement and participation around the identified solutions that make them tangible and a ground for massive local support to youth-led local change, enhancing local democracy. Our expectations match our strategy and that is the steering group that represents the partnership will steer the project, measure, monitor and evaluate its processes, with the vision and mission that the project should be a gradual handover of results and processes to the youth workers and ultimately to the target groups. We plan frequent, positive and harmonised constant communication between partners and clear task division, until the main task of the steering group will be monitoring, dissemination and reporting, while all the processes belong to the implementing target group. to accomplish that there is a need of high quality delivery of 3 international training courses for 4 youth leaders and workers from each partner, through non-formal education methodologies, build solid competences on community organising, linear and inclusive organisational mangement through holacracy and sociocracy, on coaching, to foster leadership, on leadership approaches as well as on nonviolent direct action, and youth leaders and workers at each training are expected to draft a roadmap and action plan, monitored by partners and trainers, on implementing the gained competences with the local target groups, as the processes need to be gradually handed over to the community.We plan the creation of a European-wide best practice, sustainable and easy to implement at local level, and to document every aspect of the project in the form of intellectual outputs which document the background and methods of each training, give grounds for digital learning, and offer a long term online course accessible to all those wishing to engage in local community organising. Namely we want to create a manual on youth community organising, a manual on coaching for youth workers, a manual for training youth community leadership, articles extracted from the publications and webinars on organisational management and nonviolent action, and a massive online training MOOC. To embed them in a single portal which will contain a compendium and community organising starter pack disseminated widely across the youth sector.We plan to stress the European dimension of the project, by holding 3 multiplier events to be held in each reality in parallel to promote the outcomes, engage the general public, inform about EU mobility and learning opportunities and provide the community the tools for ongoing sustainability of their actions and partnerships through EU programmes. As well with the goal of fostering partnerships between the organised community and local democratic structures. we expect 5 youth communities to be organised to offer solutions to their issues autonomously, supported and empowered by 20 trained youth workers who in turn create minimum 50 community leaders who enter partnership with 5 local authorities in solving local challenges and supporting youth-led solutions as initiators of structured dialogue and co-management approaches. Our last expectation and ambition is that through our experience and doumentation, Community organising can become a key factor in European local youth work, as a bringer of social sustainability and focusing local realities on youth needs and rights, by enacting local processes of advocacy, lobbying and network that will lead to a structured dialogue regarding youth participation in structured dialogue processes and lead to the co-management of policies and approaches that concern youth.

This project is developed by FYCA and its European partners. The project aimed to ameliorate the recognition of youth work and non-formal education through the development of certified “International youth studies” curricula and open educational materials for European Higher Education Institutions. The specific objectives were: • Stimulating and strengthening the integration of non-formal education and formal education at universities through the establishment of a certified course on International youth studies.• Creating bridges between formal and non-formal education, youth policy and practice in order to release innovation potential to raise the quality of educational and social service to Europe’s young people, to promote career flexibility and mobility, and to assert the value and utility of evidence-based policy and practice.• Strengthening human potential in the youth field by building a critical mass of qualified youth workers.• Promoting international recognition of the youth work and non-formal education through developing and adopting award criteria that are in line with the formal educational system.Through developed curricula and open educational materials, the project targeted at enhancing the quality of the human resources involved in youth work. It contributes also to the modernization of higher education by designing an integrated course for those involved or willing to involve in youth work.The project consisted of 5 international activities (2 capacity building + 3 mobility).