24 – 28 October, 2022
Ljubljana

The Association EPEKA, Soc. Ent., hosted a Youth Workers’ Mobility on Strengthening Youth Workers’ Competences in Nature Conservation.

The project aims to build additional capacity of already experienced youth workers who want to empower the young people they work with in the field of environmental issues and design initiatives that can reach out to other young people as well as the wider public. We feel it is important to carry out this project because we recognise that environmental issues are not presented within formal education systems in a way that motivates young people to actively fight climate change and to raise their sense of environmentalism. For centuries, humans have been negatively impacting on nature and we have been looking for excuses not to address the problem more comprehensively and effectively. By supporting the activities, we want to empower youth workers with skills that will make it easier for them to address young people on environmental issues, and the participating youth workers will also gain additional youth work related skills and competences through their participation in the project, which they will then transfer to their local environments. As we recognise the popularisation of environmentalism as an important topic, we have decided to carry out a transfer of the #missdreves initiative, which was implemented in Maribor in 2021, within the framework of the mobility, and, with the support of its implementation, to enable the participants to learn about all the working phases related to the planning and implementation of the initiative, which is oriented in an inclusive way and in a way that it acts as a tool for raising awareness among young people and the general public. The activities to be carried out in the framework of the mobility of youth workers will be designed in such a way that, during the course of their participation, the participants will acquire theoretical and practical knowledge that will strengthen them in the field of youth work implementation, and the participants will actively contribute to the professionalisation of the youth sector by transferring the initiative and good practices to their local environments. Within the mobility, we will also put a special emphasis on digital youth work and introduce youth workers to the methods needed to update youth work.

Aims of the project:

  • to train youth workers to design initiatives involving young people and the general public independently
  • train youth workers to identify the social needs of young people
  • implementation of the project idea in the Ljubljana area by youth workers
  • developing additional ideas, supported by youth workers, to address young people and the general public on environmental issues,
  • the transfer of environmental initiatives to the local environments of the participating organisations
  • increasing the digital skills of youth workers in designing initiatives and addressing interested publics
  • developing proposals for effective design of initiatives and advocacy actions in the youth sector
    successful implementation of youth worker mobility
  • visibility of the environmental initiative implemented within the project at local, national and international level

The Association EPEKA, Soc. Ent., is supported by: