ICDP: Empowering Youth for Participation & Well-being

The goal for 2025 is to focus on vulnerable young people and, above all, professionals who meet them in their work. We live in an increasingly polarized world. UNICEF reported in 2024 that 13% of children and young people under the age of 19 have mental illness. Youth work professionals face many challenges in their everyday lives – often these involve not only complex matters, but also feelings of exclusion and shame. There are good models for intervening in the challenges themselves, but also a need for a comprehensive approach, tools to build relationships and trust, and to gain an understanding of how the young person views the world around them and their own opportunities in it.

The Guiding Interaction programme/ICDP is a health promotion programme that aims to increase the ability to understand and respect each other by developing sensitivity and empathy. ICDP is approved by UNICEF and WHO and is used around the world. Based on modern research on health-promoting factors, ICDP provides opportunities to prevent mental and social ill-health and counteract exclusion and marginalization. ICDP is relationship- and resource-oriented and strengthens both relational competence and the sense of empowerment. The program is summarized in three dialogues: emotional, meaning-making and regulatory dialogue. These are crucial for creating functioning relationships where you can encourage, guide and regulate the young people in everyday life. In summary, the ICDP provides opportunities to develop a responsive, empathetic and respectful approach, strengthen positive interaction and focus on existing skills, resources and opportunities, as well as to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. 

Completing the training will inspire participants to use the ICDP approach in their everyday work, within their workplace, in multiprofessional collaboration and above all for guidance with young people. With ICDP as a foundation, themes such as vulnerability, exclusion, marginalization and, above all, polarization or "othering" could be addressed by strengthening young people's socio-emotional and empathy skills. Democracy education builds on young people on the one hand seeing their own agency and on the other seeing the importance of others and their contributions. As they simultaneously have self-worth and remain respectfully curious towards others they can themselves promote a community without exclusion in both micro and macro environments. With ICDP as the framework and theme for this year's training, it will not only contribute to increasing professionals' competence and knowledge in issues related to young people's psychosocial health but also offer a valuebase and a frame of reference which could promote continued cooperation in the future. 

A local youth group will contribute to the training. The aim is to bridge the gap between how adults communicate and how young people actually experience it. Through practical examples, they will highlight moments when adults have successfully—or unsuccessfully—conveyed their messages in everyday situations. 

Objective: ICDP Finland offers a three-day course in Guiding Interaction / ICDP for 26 youth workers participating in this year's Erasmus+ exchange 20-22.5.2025 (travel days 19.5 and 23.5) 

Target group: professionals who meet young people aged 13-17 in their work. Secondary target group: professionals who work with vulnerable young people and/or young people at risk of marginalization in participating countries.

Method: Three days of ICDP training (in English), a total of 20 hours. The days are both theory- and practice-based and thus enable a broad exchange of experience between the participants, which promotes international cooperation through increased understanding of each other's everyday environment and conditions. The new understanding is then reflected in the professionals' approach to the young.