Participation for Inclusion

In recent years the number of educational projects addressed to European youth has increased significantly, giving young people an unprecedented opportunity to develop in different fields. Every year there are hundreds of youth projects dedicated to a huge variety of issues, such as intercultural learning, antidiscrimination, arts and culture, healthy lifestyle, employability and many others. Thanks to Youth in Action and Erasmus + programs by European Commission as well as other international sources it became relatively easy to obtain funding for trainings, youth exchanges and other activities addressed to young people. Regardless the scope and the topic of the activity, every organizer of a youth project at some point has to face a question of how to increase the active involvement of participants. The vast majority of the projects is based on the principles of non-formal education that involves active participation of the youngsters involved. Nevertheless, there is always a risk of choosing the "easier way" and conducting the activities in a way that the knowledge flows only from trainers to participants. The other potential problem is that many organizers have been using the same tool kits for increasing participation for years without exploring new methods that could be potentially more effective for their target groups. To address the above mentioned needs, we created a project that is to gather youth workers who are interested in discovering new ways of making their projects not only more participants-oriented but also more participant-driven. We aim at finding practical methods of increasing active youth participation not only during the activity itself but also during the preparatory and follow-up stages so that the overall impact of the project is more long lasting and sustainable.