18 May, 2020
Maribor

AKTivacija – Empowering youth workers in the field of youth activation is a new project that the Association EPEKA, Soc. Ent., was successfully awarded in the Erasmus+ call for proposals. The project aims to empower youth workers who are confronted with inactive young people in their work.

Activating inactive young people is a lengthy process that requires a lot of time and effort on the part of youth workers, but it is crucial if young people, especially those with fewer opportunities, are to have equal opportunities and active participation in society. The training of youth workers will therefore, with the support of non-formal education methods, introduce a variety of methods and approaches that have a positive impact on inactive young people. Together with the participants, the project aims to address topics that are perhaps not often addressed in our daily work, to exchange and transfer good practices, to discuss the diversity of national youth work strategies and the activation of inactive young people in different geographical areas, and to reflect on how youth work is conceived and put into practice. We will therefore use non-formal education methods to acquire new knowledge in order to improve the skills of the youth workers involved, which they can then transfer to their own environments. Through implementation, we therefore want to have a wider impact on working with inactive young people in an international setting. The objectives of the project are to work with participants to develop strategies to reach and address inactive young people more effectively and to motivate them to engage in social activation programmes, where they can increase their social and employment potentials and, as a consequence, better integrate into society. To empower youth workers with skills they either do not have or would like to upgrade. The project is designed in such a way that youth workers will acquire knowledge through discussions, lectures and workshops, as well as through actual contact with inactive young people who are involved in programmes aimed at their activation. The project thus aims to address the proactivity and further education of youth workers, which will then also influence the proactivity of the young people they work with. Through field visits, we want to expose youth workers to different perspectives on the usefulness of youth work in working with young people, broaden their horizons and, supported by innovative practices, inspire them to develop and implement ideas to support young people in their own contexts at an even higher level of quality.