The project partners are eight youth organizations in Europe, all part of one umbrella organisation. Several issues were identified by our project partners: questioning if we still deliver high quality youth work to our youth leaders, how to reach young people and to address the phases of growth for the child and finally the communication gap between international and national level. In order to tackle this issues the partners need to address the needs of young people on all levels, secondly the umbrella organisation should reach beyond the representatives of the partners and thirdly the partners need to realize the full potential of cooperation under an umbrella organisation. A qualitative bottom-up research is needed to identify both the needs of the members of the partners and on the other side needs of the partners with regards to their umbrella organisation. With this strategic partnership, we roll out a qualitative research amongst seven different countries. On the result of this research we can create concrete tools that meets some of the defined needs of young people within Europe and we can implement these within our network on long term, we believe that this increases the quality of our youth work, that we will address more young people and indirectly influence our members to gain inter-cultural competencies that makes them stronger in a diversified world.
The partner organizations in this strategic partnership want to be open youth organizations where children and young people from different backgrounds feel comfortable to be who they are. We want to create an environment where they can become open-minded, self-confident people who are able to express themselves. Creating a constructive and safe environment for self-expression is crucial to avoid stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. In order to assure that the children and youth that are member of our organizations can enjoy this open environment we want to find out what they need in order to feel comfortable to express their thoughts, feelings, opinions and personality both in conversations and behavior. Furthermore, we want to know what are their thoughts on what steps can be taken by our organizations to maximize the potential for self-expression. We conducted a qualitative research among our members, focusing on the following questions: 1. How important is it for our members to be able express themselves in the youth organization? 2. What are the added values of feeling comfortable to express yourself in the youth movement? 3. To what extent do our members feel they can express themselves in the youth organization and to what extent do they have the competences to express themselves? 4. Does being part of a youth organization help our members to develop competences to express themselves? 5. What helps self-expression in their youth organization and what blocks self-expression in their youth organization? 6. About which topics do our members find it important express themselves (example spirituality, politics, gender,...)? 7. How (ex. music, clothing,...) do our members want express themselves? 8. What can we (as youth organization) do to maximize the space for self-expression? We used 4 methods for collecting qualitative data for this research: individual interviews, focus groups, online questionnaires and research activities. The methods were adapted depending the context of the organizations as well as depending on the age groups. The project partners were 8 youth organizations in Europe, all part of one umbrella organisation called FIMCAP. The research was planned to take place in 7 countries, but unfortunately 3 organizations decided to step back and not conduct the research, due to a lack of time and manpower. So the research was done in 4 countries, by 4 very diverse youth organizations. The other project partners remain involved in the further stages of the project. The results of this research have been presented at a meeting of the European member organizations of FIMCAP. They are now in the process of developing the next steps, to see how the results can be translated into actions within our network on long term.