"Political and wider social participation of young people is important as it shows the ""health"" and functioning of democracy, and has a positive impact of development of the identity of the young person (Levine, 2010: 160). Youth participation is also important because political and civil society functioning in adolescence predicts an individual's behaviour in adulthood (Obradović and Masten, 2007; Plutzer, 2002). The youth are getting more and more inactive, although different organizations are providing possibilities to encourage active participation, the problem still remains. It turns out that the big issue that all participating countries need to tackle is youth inactivity. Main mission of all participating organizations is to encourage youth participation, that young people realize, that they are in charge of developing and establishing the society they want to live in. Project 4Youth aims to develop skills, knowledge and competences of youth workers to increase their productivity and effectiveness, to encourage youth participation and to develop activities to strengthen soft skills of youth. By the end of this project we will be able to develop permanent methodology to improve the existing programs and serve as policy directives for up-coming youths or the generations to come. Within the project, we will train youth workers and give them new tools, approaches and will develop environment for fostering youth participation. We will establish intercultural cooperation among partners, networks and will conduct research of the situation in each country aiming to share best practices and to combine effective approaches into new methodology."

"The project ""Sustainable Foundations for Sustainable Partnerships"" had the aim to stregthen the capacities of all partner organisations in implementing sustainable volunteering possibilties for young people from Africa and Europe by volunteering abroad. The partner organizations for this project were from Cameroon, Malawi, Ghana, Kenya and Germany. The partners managed to interact during the project on different levels and several activties have been implemented. There has been a conference to start the project and discuss the dimensions of the topics as well as all activities. Further the project included mobility activities such as a training for youth workers to get trained in the purpose and philosophies of permaculture in youth work as well as several short job shadowing activities in order for the partners to get to know each other better but also to get to know the reality of volunteering with each partner. The results from the mobility activities as well as the previous experiences of the partners have been put into the development of a curriculum for volunteer services. After a phase of one year the partners re-evaluate this curriculum and officially adapted it as terms for their cooperation in the volunteering sector. During the project there also has been a website created in order to present the results but also to have a platform for promoting volunteering opportunities between the partners and under the same curriculum."

"""Building Capacities for Youth Participation across Borders"" is a project that will help to build a greater network between young people and the organizations they are volunteering in from 10 different countries from different regions in the world. The participants will be coming from Germany, Poland, Great Britain, Malawi, Ghana, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. During the project duration different activties will be implemented on local and on international level in order to build the capacities of the organizations and their communities for active youth participation. The chosen topic to work on with the young people invovled will be sustainable development and how they can make a difference for developoment in their own community using entrepreneurship and their own initiative. Also the project wants to support the validation and recognition of non-formal learning and education. Young people will be directly affected by this project through a youth exchange that will take place in Germany in fall 2016 and bring together 60 persons for two weeks. At the same time two EVS will be implemented in Germany as well. The youth workers and organisational managers will work with the young people throughout the project duration to ensure their local engagement. Therefore different activties will bring together these persons in charge in order to discuss the local dimension and develop new youth work methods that will train young people local but connect them globally at the same time with the help of the here established network of young people. The main focus of this project lies on the young people themselves and on their active participation. They will shape this project and they will develop the network further and help establishing its structures. Together they will work on European strategies for youth but also for global challenges as well as cooperation with different regions in the world. The outcomes of this project will be published in the form of a report. There will also be a video produced with the youngsters. The on going project will be monitored through a blog by the participants involved in the project and other multimedial tools available. After the project duration the results will be used further on the local level and the international level as well and the network will work out future projects together to ensure a sustainable and long term cooperation between the young people."