Project "LOCAL ACTION YOUTH" will encourage youth staying and being active in their rural area near big city. Its aim is to increase the quality of youth work from different fields and to improve cooperation between local action groups (working with the LEADER approach and rural development) and others involved in the youth work. Project will be carried out in fields such as: communication (how to involve youth in communication, how to attract them most effectively, how to create the image of associations and the area in general); involvement in decision making (youth participation in local development, youth policy, strategies, local decision making); facilitation of entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship as a way to solve unemployment; improvement of youth entrepreneurial skills; understanding and popularizing support systems. Project background and necessity is embedded in the challenges local actors face: youth migration to big cities, unemployment, diminishing of their skills. To solve these issues youth work has to be taken to another level, local action groups have to be seen as rural developers in general and have to cooperate with others experienced in youth work. And vice versa, those involved in youth work can learn a lot from local action groups - the value of inter-sectoral cooperation, the effective planning of local development. There will be few international meetings, local activities such as involvement of youth in local development strategies and youth policy, youth and entrepreneurs events. YOUth can improve rural areas!
"Youth - impressive when encouraged and empowered" - the slogan developed during the project illustrates the most important side of the project - paying attention to the necessity to empower youth and for youth workers (in a broad sense) to learn how to do that. The aim of the project "LOCAL ACTION YOUTH" - to improve youth work, to share experience and improve cooperation between local action groups and youth workers - was implemented. Local action groups are associations working with the involvement of society and with community-led local development, but the involvement of youth had been a challenge for them before. Also youth workers often faced the challenge to involve youth as a part of bigger society and to work with entrepreneurial topics. Therefore both youth workers and local action groups wanted to search for methods and develop their daily youth work in different interesting ways by learning from each other. This project achieved these aims in form of: 1) improving youth workers' competences in training and throughout the project, 2) trying out interesting methods during local activities, thus improving youth work, 3) boosting youth work and cross-sectoral cooperation during local activities, 4) getting to know each other and represented areas of society involvement and sharing experience in partner meetings, 5) combining, explaining and promoting various interesting methods for the improvement of youth work through practical handbook. The main results are connected with spreading the importance of youth work, paying attention to the necessity of high-quality involvement of community and youth as part of it. Important results are also the new tried out local activities that have added to the local development and cross-sectoral cooperation and can be continued further on. Interesting and valuable result is the international dimension of the project. Tangible result is the practical handbook and Facebook page, where all those who are interested can search for, try out and adapt methods in all three topics: communication, entrepreneurship and youth involvement in decision-making.