LAYOUTH comes from Local Action for Youth. But it is also the combination of LAYOUT and YOUTH. Not the least, it also aims a call towards YOU with the middle letters of the newly created word. The project involves 8 cities which were nominated as European Youth Capital title bearers in time: Braga in 2012, Maribor in 2013, Thessaloniki in 2014, Cluj-Napoca in 2015, Varna in 2017, Novi Sad in 2019, Amiens in 2020 and Klaipeda in 2021. All participating cities have their own realities. Their approach towards youth-related strategic and operational planning and ecosystem-development through cross-sectorial cooperation (public, non-governmental and private) is absolutely diversified. However, cooperation is possible between these cities as there is common ground regarding the importance given to young people, their engagement, connection and empowerment as active citizens of their city’s life, and there are mutually accepted principles like co-management of strategic initiatives between the municipality and youth actors. We will change the approach on how cities should deliver for young people in a simple yet well- structured way. At least we will try. We believe LAYOUTH will become a brand and reference point on how to work for and with young people through action planning and integrated efforts of cooperation in a participatory and inclusive way. We believe these 8 cities, through their record up to this moment and their strong commitment towards youth will really be able to ignite this innovation. The main goal of the project is to consolidate the local planning and implementation systems serving youth in participating cities, aligned with European youth-related policies while setting a standard and a wide pool of intellectual resources through which any other European city can align its own local efforts towards young generation. We defined the following specific objectives for our endeavour: SO1: to create a modern, modular, complex but still easily adaptable framework and scalable model of delivering full cycles of urban youth ecosystem development built on sustainable approaches; SO2: to improve the actual youth-related planning and delivery system of participating cities on strategic and operational level putting high emphasis on engagement, connection and empowerment of young people; SO3: to engage and to empower key organisational and organisational actors in a learning process through which their capacity of a cooperation, co-creation and co-management based local action planning and delivering in the field of youth becomes sustainable while adding significantly to the quality of life of young citizens; OD (organizational development): to develop the capacity of involved partners in being key actors of the future development of youth ecosystems in their own cities and to assist other cities in addressing the same issue. … IN KEY NUMBERS … • 1 modern, modular framework in 10 European languages, available open source for scaling and multiplication, • 1 new brand for local action planning and delivery for youth in cities of Europe: LAYOUTH, • 5 key elements of a framework for urban action planning for youth in Europe (white paper – toolkit – study cases on implemented action plans – pool of facilitators – resource centre), • 8 implemented Local Action Plans for Youth in 8 cities from 8 countries, which are harmonised by methodology. All of them evaluated through study cases. • 25 tools of empowering young people at local level collected in a single toolkit, • 32 youth facilitators organised in a European network which can be deployed in an international environment in order to provide further scaling, • 7,680 stakeholders consulted in the process, • 24,000 young people consulted about their feelings about the city and their needs and contributions to their city’s life and development, • 3,000+ European level stakeholders targeted by dissemination activities and publications, • 1.5 million euro allocated for youth programmes and initiatives in 2020 in participating cities, • 7.8 million euro allocated local budgets in partner cities for youth related investments for 2020 and 2021 The project will result in the creation of a new, modern, modular, and scalable model for delivering local action plans for youth. All characteristics are carefully considered here. Modern, as something easy to understand and to apply in practice, something to which youth organisations, groups of young people can relate to easily. Modular as something which has the quality of being understood piece by piece. Adaptable as a framework which can be easily filled with local specific content while the framework itself keeps intact. And scalable as being able to be extended to an unlimited number of cities, a characteristic derived also from its adaptability. The project is built on: * 3 intellectual outputs * 3 multiplier events * 3 training activities * 8 project meetings * 8 partner/8 country cooperation
WHAT WE DID PLAN As planned, we changed the approach on how cities should deliver for young people in a simple yet well- structured way. At least we will try. We believe LAYOUTH will become a brand and reference point on how to work for and with young people through action planning and integrated efforts of cooperation in a participatory and inclusive way. We believe these 8 cities, through their record up to this moment and their strong commitment towards youth will really be able to ignite this innovation. The main goal of the project was to consolidate the local planning and implementation systems serving youth in participating cities, aligned with European youth-related policies while setting a standard and a wide pool of intellectual resources through which any other European city can align its own local efforts towards young generation. We defined the following specific objectives for our endeavour: SO1: to create a modern, modular, complex but still easily adaptable framework and scalable model of delivering full cycles of urban youth ecosystem development built on sustainable approaches; We did this: there are now guides and model on action planning, reporting, in 9 languages. SO2: to improve the actual youth-related planning and delivery system of participating cities on strategic and operational level putting high emphasis on engagement, connection and empowerment of young people; We delivered plans for each city. We also delivered reports and youth strategy framework analyses. SO3: to engage and to empower key organisational and organisational actors in a learning process through which their capacity of a cooperation, co-creation and co-management based local action planning and delivering in the field of youth becomes sustainable while adding significantly to the quality of life of young citizens; We also managed to deliver this. We engaged in consultations, we created local action groups, and most importantly, we engaged with young people through two Happy City OD (organizational development): to develop the capacity of involved partners in being key actors of the future development of youth ecosystems in their own cities and to assist other cities in addressing the same issue. WHAT WE DID NOT PLAN That is COVID-19. Our project was completely broken for a while during the pandemic. We halted meetings, trainings, anything in person. What we did is we converted the new situation into a better understanding of new challenges for young people in cities. We managed to publish a first analysis covering 8 European Youth Capital cities on the subjective well-being of young people which covered the worst period of the pandemic, Spring 2020, when the shock was still at its fullest. Our report showed how young people perceived the pandemic, how their perceived their city’s action and how they acted themselves. We repeated the Happy City study in 2022, so now we also have comparable data. We also enabled better virtual cooperation of cities. We had online meetings, even an exceptional online Happy City Conference during Autumn 2022 with the participation of mayors, experts, youth leaders and European level decision makers. WHAT WE FAILED AT We could not do two action planning periods because the pandemic rearranged. We did not organise as many activities as planned, but we rearranged them within budgetary and the overall project framework limits. WHAT WE ARE PROUD OF CITIES.YOUTH.FUTURE, a new vision and policy framework on how cities should address and involve young people in creating their own futures, a future whose main beneficiaries will be young people themselves. This vision and framework will be our mantra for future action, and this will take our experience, our work further based on a belief that most innovation can happen in cities and that young people should be part of it.
LAYOUTH comes from Local Action for Youth. But it is also the combination of LAYOUT and YOUTH. Not the least, it also aims a call towards YOU with the middle letters of the newly created word. The project involved 8 cities which were nominated as European Youth Capital title bearers in time: Braga in 2012, Maribor in 2013, Thessaloniki in 2014, Cluj-Napoca in 2015, Varna in 2017, Novi Sad in 2019, Amiens in 2020 and Klaipeda in 2021. All participating cities have their own realities. Their approach towards youth-related strategic and operational planning and ecosystem-development through cross-sectorial cooperation (public, non-governmental and private) is absolutely diversified. However, cooperation is possible between these cities as there is common ground regarding the importance given to young people, their engagement, connection and empowerment as active citizens of their city’s life, and there are mutually accepted principles like co-management of strategic initiatives between the municipality and youth actors. The basic need came from the fact that cities (and countries) define programmes and strategies for medium and long term, however, especially at local level, distribution of resources happens on a yearly basis. Hence, there was a need of cities to better understand, to develop and to implement means and tools based on which youth related planning on short-term can be delivered and budgets can be allocated for priorities and specific action which is well defined. We also applied for this project because we believed that the framework provided by the still informal Network of European Youth Capitals is a good ground to deliver meaningful intellectual work which would benefit not just partners and other stakeholders from our cities, but also a wide range of other cities, European experts and decision-makers, too. This was our initial plan. However, everybody has a strategy until one receives the first punch. In our case, this was COVID-19. Partners were put in a serious situation following the outbreak of the pandemic which had a massive effect especially on international cooperation. So, our plans adapted to this new situation and tried to use the assets of the project also in this sense. We understood that the updated need is to have a fast and better understanding of young people in our cities in the context of lockdowns. Then, we understood, that if our in-person interaction was impossible, we shall embrace other solutions. While we were practically in recess for almost a year regarding our work, we managed to reinstate our cooperation through the first Happy City Survey, then through an exceptional online conference which managed to discuss study conclusions, and then we managed to extend our initial plans regarding the tools and guidelines we were working on. So, final results of the project were kept in the mainstream of the project’s topic, but we managed to extend the intellectual framework and we managed to created a policy context for it, too.