Welcome to youthcentres.eu

Open Youth Work For An Open Society

This website was designed to make open youth work and especially youth centres better known as places of open youth work and to support their work. For this purpose we publish information about youth centres in Europe, their activities and studies about youth work. In addition, together with young people, professionals, scientists, we create a profile of what youth centres should look like and from which requirements profile of employees we should start. For decision-makers in politics we compile a collection of facts why it makes sense to promote open youth work, especially in youth centres.

In our understanding, the term “youth centres” describes a place where young people can meet, develop their skills and work together. Between the different regions and legal frameworks, however, there is a completely different understanding of the context and framework for services, support and implementation of activities.

It is worth visiting this page again. We are planning to publish more sections and expand the existing ones. In doing so, we will add the “What is?” sections by the summer. In the summer, the section “How it should be?” will then be filled. There we will formulate requirements for youth centres and their staff and young people will tell us what their “dream youth centre” looks like. In the coming spring we will then publish an argumentation aid. This should help you and others to lobby political decision-makers so that youth centres throughout Europe can be financed. To this end, we will work out what benefits youth arbitration has for the individual but also for society.

  • Youth Centres – Support us! It will support you!

    We are 5 partners working together in a project called “Open Youth Work For Open Society – Give A Chance To Informal Youth Centres”. With this project we want to support the idea of youth centres as a place for open youth work.  This we do, by creating several contents for this website. If you see the page structure, you can get a idea about what we plan. Please be patient and take a look from time to time!

    In order to achieve this goal, we would like to provide an overview of what open youth work means, how it is implemented in different parts of Europe and what it can achieve. In addition, we would like to compile a collection of facts for political decision-makers as an argumentation aid so that open youth work can be reliably, independently and sustainably promoted and financed in the future.

    The attached questionnaires “Survey about youth centres in Europe” and “Survey about youth centres activities in Europe” contribute to this. It would help us a lot to achieve a good and significant result from which you can also profit in the future. In any case you will be inspired by the way others work, but in the best case we improve the awareness of the decision makers for youth work and achieve an increase in the quality of youth work.

    Please download and fill in the questionnaires and either send them to us using the “Send” function of Acrobat Reader, or save the file and send it to survey@youthcentres.eu!

  • Start up meeting in Pancevo

    From 22nd to 26th September 2019 we held our start up meeting in Pancevo (Serbia). Project partners arrived with delegations of 2 members and coordinating partner with 3 persons. Hosting partner was Narandzasti. This is a youth association established in 2009. It is implementing several activities on local level and collaborate with international partners. It has a close cooperation with Dom Omladine Pancevo (House of Youth Pancevo). The meeting took place in this facility.

    We followed several goals with the activity, all targeted to guarantee a smooth project flow. Following this we started with a session which let us know all present persons and get a idea about profile of participating partners. After the project was visualized and changes which appeared after project design were explained. For instance we planned to implement a blended activity with youth, which was not approved. Even that we did not made reasonable why this activity is needed, it was recommended by National Agency to apply as separate project. Talking about youth centres, which should be based on the participation of young people, without involving young people, seemed pointless. Therefore we extended our starting meeting and designed the youth exchange as a separate project.

    But before this, we had to talk about the administration of the project, especially about timeline, budget, reporting and collaboration tools. We agreed everything with fixed dates and were ready to sign the activity agreement.

    After we talked about the steps to achieve our project results and how it should be published. We agreed to put all outputs only online, because we did not wanted to pollute the earth with unneeded prints. Also online material is much more easy to disseminate.

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