This good practice exchange between 7 youth educational centres in residence (REC) from Serbia, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, Romania, Lithuania and Germany has been created due to the lack of transnational networking opportunities. While using this long-term project to build tight(er) bonds amongst all partners involved, it also aims at strengthening the vision of what a youth educational centre in residence is and what structures and contents it should provide, also considering a European dimension of youth work. We aim at exchanging good practices linked to the quality of hosting and youth work provided by the residential educational centres participating in the project, at increasing the capacity of educational centres to host youth groups with diverse backgrounds and needs, at developing tools for ensuring quality residential educational centres in Europe, and at building a network of residential centres for good practice exchange. During three in-person partner meetings involving the coordinator of each centre for this project as well as four staff trainings, we want to involve and qualify a minimum of 80 participants in the field of European youth work in residential youth centres. The cooperation for this project is based on a partnership that involves all centres equally (thus, each centre is visited once during the partnership and each centre sends participants to the activities held). We communicate about results and further steps to be taken on a continuous basis, sharing tasks amongst all partners. With this project, we wish to strengthen the working ethics and self-understanding of all centres involved, to help them to increase their knowledge and competences when it comes to working on the European level but in a residential centre, to make our topics more visible to other stakeholders and build a strong partnership that outlasts the timeframe of this project.
By exchanging best practice between residential youth centers, we did improve our quality in running non-comercial youth centers with european education content. We can increase our cooperation and developed common quality standards for working with young people.
With this project, we aimed at strengthening the network of European Youth Educational Centres in residence (RECs) taking part in this cooperation and beyond. We wanted to share good practices and qualify our key staff and affiliated personnel in running inclusive, European and international youth educational centres. At the same time, all centres live upon the integration of young people into their work. Thus, our project is also dedicated to sharing knowledge and good practices on how to involve young people into each centre's work, how to keep them interested in our offers and how to qualify them further so that they themselves become multiplicators of European youth work.