The preliminary discussions that is defined and identified the barriers to the active participation of individuals in society took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Social exclusion, often referred to in social sciences and policy documents, is the multi-layered process of individuals or groups to break away from social relations, ties or institutions and not to participate in social spaces and activities. Youth work is an important area of social exclusion debates. Peter Lauritzen summarizes youth work as a social, cultural, educational and political work that is carried out for young people and with young people outside of the school, through non-formal methods. Young people, with their subcultures, habits, needs and demands, often fall outside of the norm or wandering around the area of a norm. Therefore, they face legal, structural and cultural barriers to their participation in society. In this context, youth work is defined as an important tool for the social participation of young people in different periods. Within the scope of the project, it is aimed to establish concrete resources for increasing the social impact of youth work on the international platform, supporting institutions and experts working in this field with quality management and innovative methods and for sustainable studies in the field. Therefore we summarize following NEEDS to be targeted by the Project, which demonstrate at the same time the overall objects we want to achieve and results we aim to achieve: 1) to develop a scientific approach to intercultural communication and understanding, including general findings on the skills needed by young people and especially youth workers in the skills needs of them and development of guidelines for the trainings. At the same time to collect transnationally information on best practice especially to integrate different cultural, generational and gender aspects on the issue. These facts shall be respected in the intellectual outputs) - IO1 2) a train the trainer handbook providing information on how to develop the competences needed to be able to encourage and motivate young people in exploring diversity as important value and foster their intercultural understanding and skills in communication and conflict resolution - IO2 implementation of the trainings with youth workers (transnational and national) 3) a handbook including a curriculum for youth workshops which will provide information and best practice for youth workers on how to guide young people in the issue of intercultural understanding and conflict resolution and how to enable them to improve their skills dealing with these issues. Workshops will be based on an experience based approach which will help the young people to experience the effects by themselves and thus improve the learning results. 4) The videos will offer a special possibility for training institutions involving blended learning concepts in their curricula. They target youth workers and shall provide them a possibility to include this approach to their repertoire by self-learning. So, the target group of IO3 will be in this topic experienced youth workers. 5) a distance learning platform for Youth workers to promote the learning outputs and tools to a broader audience, especially to targets living in communities apart for which f2f trainings might not be that easily accessible. This platform contents will be prepared by the YP themselves in the workshops of IO4 like: - Youth Information outreach to disadvantaged groups - Digital Youth Information and Counselling - Youth Participation and Empowerment - Planning & Management - Gaming and using material in youth work Direct targets: 1) Youth workers and social workers in youth care, Organisations and stakeholders in the field of youth work. 2) Young people with different cultural background Activities/Results: IO1: Comparative research and assessment of current needs, study report on youth work - 20 youth workers involved each country= 20x6= 120 in total IO2: Designing training modules in youth work and piloting - 20 future youth workers and 10 additional youth workers (who has potencial to be youth worker) in further training trained per country = 180 total IO3: Training videos for blended learning implementation - 2 videos per country = 12 videos total IO4: Designing a distance education program and LEVEL5 program in the field on youth workers - 20 youth worker (for 1.Piloting: 10 Youth worker & for 2.Piloting: 10 Youth worker) from other organisations in each country (total = 120 youth workers ) IO5: Guidelines for Inclusion of the Methodology in settings for Youth Workers - 15 decision makers/service providers reached in focus groups per country = 90 in total LTT (C1: Palermo, C2: Innsbruck, C3: Malaga): From each country 5 youth workers (90 youth workers in total) who participated in LLT.
Our main objective was to equip youth workers skills with some competences that they can apply them to support youngsters from rural areas. We provided a range of learning and teaching tools that some of them can be listed such as youth work with a life-world oriented perspective, self-motivation, conflict management, creating individual working methods for youth, communication skills and techniques, non-formal, formal, and informal learning settings, handling diversity, youth opportunities provided by Erasmus +, prevention and safeguarding of disadvantaged youth, key concepts on diversity, intercultural learning, cultural competence, emotional intelligence, exchange good practices on the youth work field, offering trainings and activities for disadvantaged youth and assessment of their target group’s progress. Through the project, we developed learning tools and offered opportunities for youth workers that they can transfer them into their daily practices working with young people from rural areas in the project partner countries. Moreover, we could catch decision makers and public institutions working on this field up in the needs of youngsters from rural areas and encouraged them to cooperate for the future practices.
As youth work is an important area of social exclusion debates and youth work is defined as an important tool for the social participation of young people in different period, as the project consortium we have recognised the gaps in youth work practices in the project partners. In order to fulfil these gaps we identified these 3 groups having different needs; disadvantaged young people who face different obstacles because of their educational, social, and cultural background, young people and young people who are motivated to getting new skills and competences on youth work field. On this point, our main attention has been to include young people who are disadvantaged background and to develop an innovative methodology to minimise structural and cultural barriers these young people face and to equip the youth workers with new skills and competences to implement more inclusive youth work activities. During the project process, the Inno4Impact project consortium has established a range of resources and tools to enhance social impact of youth work on the international platform, support the institutions and experts working on this field through active and inclusive methods and make these project practices sustainable in the long term.