Youth empowerment is a process where children and young people are encouraged to take charge of their lives. They do this by addressing their situation and then take action in order to improve their access to resources and transform their consciousness through their beliefs, values, and attitudes. Youth empowerment aims to improve quality of life. Youth empowerment is achieved through participation in youth empowerment programs. However, scholars argue that children’s rights implementation should go beyond learning about formal rights and procedures to give birth to a concrete experience of rights. There are numerous models that youth empowerment programs use that help youth achieve empowerment. A variety of youth empowerment initiatives are underway around the world. These programs can be through non-profit organizations, government organizations, schools, or private organizations.Empowerment should be considered as a process and also a tool and to increase the meaningfulness of the empowerment work with changes in power relations is highly needed. Thus, empowering the agency will not only affect if the relevant structures in the power relations which are still continuing to be available in the society. Considering power structure as an iceberg that has visible and invisible sides, visible sides indicate the formal parts of power as institutions, authorities, laws, and rules and invisible sides indicate the informal pars of power as socialized norms, discourses, and cultural practices. Empowerment work deals with that iceberg and deconstructs and equips individuals to deal with visible and invisible power groups. Considering the youth as an experience and the empowerment as a tool for increasing the capacities of young people and make them able to act and participate and considering youth workers participation to that process and increasing the capacities of youth workers in that field of work would increase the participation of young people and creation of strategies in this field has importance to promote participation and inclusion of young people in economical, social and political life. The project aimed to strengthen the competence of young people to increase. their participation through using empowerment strategies in their daily lives. An objective of the project was for volunteers from Turkey and Europe to work side by side with people directly affected by poverty in Africa. As a collaborative group of local and international activists, our volunteers rised to the challenge of poverty and helped the development of the youth in Uganda through volunteering activities. Besides that, the Ugandan youth participated in Actions held in Turkey and Uganda and it increased the understanding of poverty among young people and its implications. Through the project, the capacities of youth workers from participating countries concerning the empowerment strategies and usage of empowerment tools in their daily work. On the other hand, the Ugandan partners capacity is increased relatively due to implemented activities by the volunteers during their stay.The project consisted of European Voluntary Service in Kampala, Uganda for 3 months for 24 young people coming from Spain, Turkey and Romania, Youth Exchange for 24 people in Turkey with participants from Turkey, Uganda, Spain and Romania. As a complimentary activity, training activity with 20 people coming from Turkey, Uganda, Spain and Romania will which took place in Kampala,Uganda.

As stated in the application, this project was created to better understand how hate narratives spread through traditional and social media, among other channels; and to design strategies to resist them. In the world of instant communication, we found the need to educate ourselves further as youth workers so we could create a fitting environment for our youth to be able to identify and act against hate narratives.Though we faced many challengues due to the COVID 19 pandemic, our work ethic, our flexibility and our experience with digital youth work allowed us to overcome the problems and create a meaningful and succesful project. We were able to meet all of our goals and a number of extra, high quality outcomes were produced within this projectThe objectives set for this projects were:-To improve the competences of youth workers on the topic of radicalisation, inclusion and empowerment-To promote empowerment of young people with fewer opportunities throughout carrying researches to create needs and interest based empowerment models for youth workers to practice related to hate narratives and radicalisation-To raise awareness on youth workers about hate narratives, radicalisation and empowerment and its implications in youth work-To create innovative empowerment models for the inclusion of young people and create educational material and theoretical framework on social, economical and cultural empowerment-To understand the challenges on inclusion in participating countries and address those challenges through upskilling youth workers on empowerment with the goal of combatting hate narrative and ability to make informed decisions-To qualify youth workers as multipliers and trainers in the field of youth to develop new empowerment models and implement trainings to empower the young peopleThe beneficiaries of this project have been both youth workers and young people. In this project we involved youth professionals and educators from youth organisations as well as formal and non formal education entities, moreover, due to the partner organisations profile, we were able to reach a large number of youth workers from a variety of fields: we've had participants with experience working with migrants, NEETS, refugees, minorities and youngsters with fewer opportunities.As the project developed, several actions and activities were planned and executed involving young people from our local communities. Since the pandemic we've observed a particularly worrying rise of hate speech, not only online (where it grew exponentially), but also in the traditional media, signalling how deep the hate narratives have implanted themselves in our day to day; and as a result of this, several actions were put in motion, such as the Let's Talk project, a dialogue based activity open to youngsters from all around the world interested in sharing opinions and ideas about intercultural awareness, mental health, communication an media, and more. This project was created as a space to allow youngsters to connect during the hardest months of the confinement and find common ground.Our digital magazine, Youth Work Today, our network for youth workers, the Education Umbrella Network; as well as our two Cross-Sectoral Transnational Exchange Projects CSTEPs (view results section in the Beneficiary Project Details page); are also examples of initiatives that have been heavily influenced by this project. We are now more aware than ever that, to be able to put up a fight against hate speech, we need to be able to learn from each other, focus on our similarities and have a space to share ideas and create common goals.Indirectly, we planned to reach the local communities of the partner organisations, as well as local media, institutions and entrepreneurs. Due to the pandemic, we weren't able to have a physical presence in each community, however, because we had to move our actions online, we took advantage of the possibility to widen our reach and allow our influence to move beyond our partnership and all across Europe.Through this project we've established meaningful and lasting relationships with other youth workers, we are now more aware of hate narratives and have a variety of tools, materials and experiences to withstand its growing tendency.

An increasing number of experts believe that mankind is about to be confronted with a radical change of economic and social way of life. These changes will be driven by the accelerated development of technologies. Klaus Martin Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, made a comprehensive reference to the idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in his speech in Davos on 20 January 2016. According to Schwab, we are soon to see changes of the scale and complexity unknown to mankind. In a long-term perspective the new technological transition may lead to a revolutionary breakthrough in labour efficiency and economical development. However, in a short-term perspective it may cause a substantial imbalance in the world economy, thereby aggravating inequality and encouraging the risk of global structured unemployment. As the issue of the Covid-19 pandemic was even not foreseen within our project, although, it showed us that the need behind the virtual collaboration and efficiency tools for the youth organization is highly relevant in the field of youth. As the consortium members, we become the one pioneering organization for the organisations in the youth field during the pandemic due to our experience concerning the virtual tools and implementation of virtual activities during the pre-pandemic period. As we have explained in the project application stage, the change foreseen by Schwab was happened and our project became more relevant. Furthermore, as consortium members this experience give us an opportunity to implement our activities in a profound manner. Due to the times we are going through, the very approach to youth work, and the organisation of youth organisations has been changed and almost all youth organisations are already feeling the change. Traditional ways of communicating with young people are becoming outdated, unimplementable and they are being replaced with virtual platforms. Youth Exchanges are now reaching many more young people through Erasmus+ Virtual Exchanges, young people from many more backgrounds and situations are now able to access the program without travel and the pandemic gave us an opportunity to explore new ways of virtual collaboration and provide information for the other organizations outside of our consortium which increased the outreach of the project. Objectives of the project : - To explore different existing competence models and platforms to help youth workers to become efficient and effective in today's climate of realities and priorities; - To develop skills of youth organisation to organise effective models for communication, project management, project development, supporting young people online, reaching a wider audience of youth; - To exchange good practices and experience in digitalising our organisations; - To explore together ways how to be prepared for challenges and how to work with limited budgets effectively and efficiently; - To develop a sustainable and effective model of youth work for youth organisations using online cloud based platforms, online communication and social media as tools. - To develop network on international and regional levels. - To develop ways to work virtually to reach more young people, communicate with other organisations more effectively and become more efficient organisations. The target groups that we worked with was youth organisations and youth workers working with young people on daily basis. As a result of the project following outputs were developed : - Online Network - Toolkit of information about tools and processes that may help you to save you time and finances in your organization;- Research about the young people's need in the virtual youth work area - Cross-Border Youth Work Magazine to reach youth workers Within the project, along with the several local workshops implemented in each country, two face to face transnational meetings were implemented in Spain ( April 2019 ) and Slovenia ( September 2019 ), the third transnational meeting was planned to be implemented in Turkey in March 2020 though, due to Covid-19 pandemic, the activity was cancelled. Between March 2020 until the end of the project, we have implemented several online workshops, Erasmus+ partnering fairs and developed a toolkit with the involvement of the partner organizations.

Saint Vincent is one of the poorer island nations in the Caribbean and one of the world's most disaster prone countries. Global Warming means longer periods without rain. Only 7% of the farms in St. Vincent have irrigation systems. Water reservoirs and gray water systems need to be built and water conservation measures need to be taken to secure food production in the future. Climate Change means more flooding and hurricanes. In 2014 extreme weather hit St. Vincent and left thousands without public water, with heavy destruction of roads, bridges and houses and hundreds in shelters. The damages from the 2014 disasters alone equaled 17% of the small developing island nation’s GDP. An objective of the project was for volunteers from Europe to work side by side with people directly affected by the impoverishing effects of climate change. As a collaborative group of local and international climate activists, our volunteers will rise to the challenge of planting trees to prevent landslides, keeping rivers and drains clear to prevent flooding, starting organic home gardens to promote food security and teaching others how to be more prepared for Climate change at the same time to learn and be prepare for similar situations which are happening last years in Europe.Erasmus+ KA2 Capacity Building Project “Climate Activism Actions” combined new methodologies and tools creation; youth participation at ghlobal mobility of youth workers and European Voluntary Service activities in order to support sustainable EU and UN envorienmental goals for 2020. Public bodies, NGOs and social partners worked together to find the effective ideas and solutions and learned more on types of general climate actions and campaigns that can be carried out within cooperation. EVS from the practical implementation of actions were held in ST. Vincent for more participants. Transfer of innovations were implemented in Turkey, Lithuania during the Mobility of Youth workers for different age and social status people.Objectives:•to learn and implement climate actions •to explore community needs and to formulate innovations that will help as prevention•to build up competences and to start practice tools on climate entrepreneurshipSt. Vincent is an island nation, where is no economic surplus to budget for a short or long term environmental protection plan against landslides and erosion. The St. Vincent Climate Compliance Conference 2012 - 2021 is a new kind of environmental movement that seeks to educate, raise awareness and mobilize people to take action. Since the start of the program hundreds of people have received lessons, also supports the effort of soil conservation from the Forestry Department. The next innovation stems from the behavior changes and habit improvements of local people. On a long-term basis, people are mobilized to be part of projects that they saw a direct outcome from: they start to use homemade bio products instead of chemicals, they collected waste separately instead of littering the streets and farmers start to collect rain water in their gardens etc. These small, manageable steps helped make St . Vincent and the Grenadines sustainable and educated Europeans after their return to their homes, they started to adapt this useful knowledge to their envorienment and community. The reality of a small island nation like St. Vincent recieved already again some of the volunteers who have participated to EVS as climate activists and they are contiuning to contribute to St. Vincentian and their own communities.

<< Background >>In the article written by Mari-Klose and Moreno titled “Youth, Family Change and Welfare Arrangements” refers to the very issue that the welfare system structures are the main cause of the lack of emancipation in youth specifically in the countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy or Turkey where the family is the main welfare provider than the state. As a result, the young people’s social rights are in the hands of their families and they cannot emancipate themselves and take a decision for themselves as autonomous individuals in their life trajectories which in long run results with the marginalisation and exclusion of young people. Regarding youth citizenship, the market and family's role in social service provision is essential. The states' role is usually to eliminate the social stratification within society. When the state does the service provision, the young people have the autonomy, but when the market or the family does it, the young people are valued concerning their market value or depending on their families to reach social rights. Spain falls into the Southern Welfare States classification due to its social and cultural norms as the family does the service provision. Thus, the young people's citizenship depends on their families rather than themselves which results in the denied citizenship of the young people as the statistics elaborated shows the emerging need of the implementation of the project again. To elaborate the context in a deepened manner, we would like to emphasize the three main issues specifically the education attainment in low-socioeconomic backgrounds, the proportion of the NEETs and the proportion of young people living in the family homes to define the context in which we want to address the issue of social welfare systems and implement advocacy and awareness-raising through training for young people and youth workers. The proportion of NEETs in participating countries as 13,3% in Portugal, 16,3% in Spain, 18.4% in Turkey, 19,5% in Greece, 22,5% in Italy and for the female population this ratio goes to twice as more in several countries for example in Turkey it is 52.4% among the female population. In 2019, it was counted that only 18.5% of young people aged between 16 to 29 years in Spain are living outside of their family homes that means that 81% of them are still residing in their family homes which is around 50% in Turkey and 60% in Italy and 54.2% in Portugal. When young people cannot find employment, they are seeking refuge in education and their educational cycle lingers towards to 35-40 ages. According to the research made by BBVA concerning the youth unemployment refers to this direct issue as the young people do not have any means to search for a job or the subsidiary measures are mainly based in the family/household income rather than the income of the individual lacks the young people’s participation. The education attainment of the young people coming from low socio-economic backgrounds is lower as the education and the expenses comes with it are expected to be covered by the families and if the family cannot provide, the young people decides to involve in the employment in early ages going down up to 16 in the cases of the countries that involved in the project.<< Objectives >>Ni-Ni and Yo-Yo : Youth Trajectories and Dilemma of Social Welfare Systems in Southern Europe is one of its kind project involving the youth grassroots and youth experts to attempt to make change in the social welfare systems which is one of the root causes of the Ni-Ni and Yo-Yo youth trajectories. The project name comes from the both Ni-Ni by referring to the NEETs and drawback youth from the society and Yo-Yo by referring to the prolonged Youth and the repetitive trajectory between the state of being youth and state of being adult. The project aims to create an awareness on the root causes of these issues which is the Social Welfare system structure in the participating countries as it is widely discussed by the scholars. This issue is very well-known by the youth scholars although among the youth workers it is not discussed or advocated. We want to address these issues for the youth field to act towards to make a change and create a linkage between the youth policy research and the youth practitioners. We aim to provide a road map for the youth NGOs for advocating the social rights of young people as well as increasing the capacities of youth NGOs in the way of the research with our project as even there are several projects focusing on the very issue of social rights concerning the young people and create an awareness on the issue of the social welfare system by focusing on four areas : housing, education, employment, health rights and participation of the young people. The objectives of the project : -To analyse the youth trajectories in Southern Europe countries and implications of Southern Europe Welfare System on young people’s lives -To develop policy paper as a road map for the governments in respective countries on the life of young people concerning their rights-To understand the causes behind the existence of NEETs in respective countries and provide a road map for the youth workers to reach these young people -To increase the skills of youth workers in the issue of denied youth citizenship resulting with the marginalisation and exclusion of young people and tackling situation of prolonged youth and Ni-Ni youth trajectories<< Implementation >>The activities concerning the planning purposes of the project activities : 1.Kick-Off Meeting in Alcala la Real,Spain for 3 days ( 3rd Month of the project ) 2. Mid-Term Meeting in Statista,Greece ( 12th month of the project ) 3. Evaluation Meeting in Diyarbakır,Turkey ( 23rd month of the project ) The learning,teaching training activities :1) Human Rights of Youth:Training for Young People will be the training for the young people concerning youth citizenship, social welfare structures and the human rights of youth. The training activity will be implemented inAlcala la Real for 5 day period with the involvement of 30 participants and 5 trainers in May 2022.2) Training of Trainers for Youth Workers will be the training for youth workers to share about the developed handbook and engage them in the advocacy process of the developed policy recommendations and the awareness raising materials as documentary. The training activity will be implemented in Diyarbakır for 5 day period with the involvement of 20 youth workers and 3 trainers in March 2023.Multipler Events (E1-E5) in each country : Ni-Ni and Yo-Yo : Youth Trajectories and Dilemma of Social Welfare Systems in Southern Europe National Conference and Documentary Screening will target young people, youth policy makers, academics and politicians. The event will both multiply the project results with the outer audience as well as used as advocacy purposes. International Conference(E6): Ni-Ni and Yo-Yo : Youth Trajectories and Dilemma of Social Welfare Systems in Southern Europe International Conference : We plan to implement this event in Madrid to beable to reach the relevant policy makers and representatives from participating countries to engage in adialogue with the young people, youth workers and youth researchers in between 21st and 23rd month of the project. Other activities : Promotion Activities – Opening Events : The promotion events will be implemented to promote the projectactivities and engage with the stakeholders and young people in the participating countries.Engaging with Politicians : Each organisation will involve in the lobbying process with the politicians intheir own country. Online Webinar - Ni-Ni and Yo-Yo : Youth Trajectories and Dilemma of Social Welfare Systems in Southern Europe : To increase the outreach of the project activities, we will implement online webinar with the involvement of the outer audience right after the international conference. The activity will be implemented online and will involve relevant stakeholders from the target groups of youth policy makers, youth work practitioners, young people and youth researchers.<< Results >>Expected Project Results ( Outputs ) : 1.The Voices of Young People and Youth Trajectories in Southern Europe ( Research Report ) We will make a research with 100 young people in qualitative ( 20 per each country ) and 1000 young people through the quantitative methodologies in 5 months period. The research report will focus on the housing, health, education, employment and political and civic participation along with the best practices of the Youth NGOs in Southern Europe for the inclusion of young people as well as promoting the active citizenship of spesifically NEETs and young people who are in the repetative cycle of being youth. 2.“Voices of Young people in Southern Europe : Challenges and Recommendations for the Youth Policy Makers” ( Policy Paper ) As a result of the research paper, we will develop the policy paper to engage in dialogue with the youth policy makers. In each country will develop their own country contexts and we will develop the paper for a call for in the European level to address these challenges that they are identified in the research report. This will be discussed over the during the training with the youth workers and we will receive feedback from the youth workers concerning to its content. 3.Human Rights for Youth and Tackling with Denied Youth Citizenship : Methods for Youth Workers in Southern Europe ( Training Methodology ) For the implementation of the training course with the youth workers, we will develop a 5- day methodology of the training with a focus of human rights of youth, how to deal with the denied youth citizenship issue to promote the participation of young people with fewer opportunities specifically the NEETs as well as young people who are widely excluded from the society. 4.Stories from Young People in Southeastern Europe (Audiovisual Material ) The stories that are listened from the young people concerning the right areas defined in the project as housing, health, education, employment and political and civic participation will be documented and prepared videos and uploaded to the web-site dedicated to project to reach out the wider audience. Training Activities1)Human Rights of Youth:Training for Young PeopleThe target group of training will be the young people who will act as multipliers in their own countries to involve in the research activity and reach out the young people in their own communities along with the professionals from participating organisations. This activity will be the initiation of the project as we will ask young people to reach out the others to involve in the research activity as well as we will make them aware the issue of the denied citizenship as a common problem of the participating countries. 2)Training of Trainers for Youth WorkersThe training activities target group will be the youth workers who are the professional staff/volunteers of the participating organizations and who will implement the multiplier events, engage with the political instutions for the advocacy work as well as to work with their own target groups. We expect that the youth workers knowledge on the human rights of youth increases and they will work as change makers towards to the very issue of inclusion of young people. We expect that the project will produce following outcomes : - Increased visibility of NEETs and young people with fewer opportunities in the society due to engagement with - Increased knowledge among young people and youth workers on the issues related to social welfare systems in participating countries - Increased knowledge of youth workers on inclusion of NEETs and excluded young people due to social welfare structures - Newly developed policies as a result of the engagement with policy makers focusing on the human rights of youth - Newly developed policies towards to prevention of marginalisation of young people by promoting their active citizenship along with economic,social and political participation