The European Youth Parliament (EYP) and its national member organisations consist of thousands of volunteers who implement hundreds of non-formal education activities per year. Driven almost entirely by young volunteers, EYP member organisations face various challenges in sustaining ambitious activities, and in maintaining stable and successful organisational structures. The project “Strengthening Participation, Diversity and Peer Learning in the European Youth Parliament“ aims at developing the European Youth Parliament network and several of its national member organisations towards becoming a more competent and sustainable organisatio. Its goal is to help young volunteer leaders advance the quality of their ongoing activities in youth work. This transnational youth initiative will build up a sustainable platform for the exchange of experiences and best practices among the partner organisations. Extensive knowledge exchange and peer collaboration will be facilitated by volunteer-led working groups in four fields that are of specific relevance for the organisational development of the partners: Organisational Management, Strategy, Inclusion and Diversity, and Quality Assurance. The project will be steered and implemented by young volunteers from across Europe, and will be geared towards integrating efficient knowledge exchange structures and processes among the participating partners. The aims of the project are to foster the stability and continuity of core organisational activities among all partners, to strengthen leadership and management capacities across the partner organisations, to support inclusion and outreach practices, to review and strengthen quality assurance activities, and to foster knowledge sharing and the exchange of good practices among all partners. By fostering sustainable, better quality youth work and more inclusive programmatic activities, we hope that the project will in the longer term benefit the many future participants of the EYP’s non-formal education activities, which are going to be organised by the participating project partners over the next years.
The implemented project “Strengthening Participation, Diversity and Peer Learning in the European Youth Parliament” aimed to develop the European Youth Parliament network and several of its national member partners towards becoming a more competent and sustainable organization. Its goal was to enable young volunteer leaders to advance the quality of their ongoing activities in youth work. The project has included 11 transnational meetings, 109 participants from 12 partner organizations, and 40 events in 11 countries. We estimate that as many as 17000 young people have benefitted from the project indirectly. The participants of the project were volunteers and youth workers from partner organisations that were selected through open calls. Within the scope of the project, we have conducted a cohesive evaluation of the EYP’s methodology, enabled structured and consistent knowledge exchange among youth workers from the 12 partner organisations and beyond, provided support to youth workers, established a structure that safeguards the safety of young participants, and implemented new measures for accessibility and inclusion. These long-term changes will have a sustained impact on the development of EYP as an organisation. The International Strategy, one of the main outputs of the project, highlights goals and guides partners in different areas of sustainable development and growth for at least five years – a direct contribution to the overall sustainability of the network in strategic fields such as organisational development, inclusion and outreach, knowledge sharing and societal impact.