The project of partnership between 6 organizations from Poland Portugal, Belgium, Romania, Slovenia and Macedonia consists in collecting and exchange of best practices of municipalities to make their cities youth friendly. In the project partners are reaching out to municipalities in their regions and countries to examine various dimensions of youth friendliness. Partners will collect detailed knowledge, hands-on examples, implementation methods and strategies of those municipalities to support those various dimensions of youth friendliness. Collected best practices we plan to exchange during 1 learning mobility (for youth workers and municipality representatives) and put together in a publication to be delivered to a network of municipalities in our countries. At the end of the project we plan to put together various criteria for municipalities of how they can become more youth friendly. The project will impact concrete municipalities engaged in the process, as well as partners and networks. Ina longer run we plan to continue a mission of supporting municipalities in transition to youth friendly cities. Aims of the project thereby are: 1) To collect best practices of friendly youth cities implementation in various dimensions, e.g infrastructure, youth participation and co-management, education and youth opportunities, youth rights protection. health and information, as inspirations and incentives for youth policy making at a local level, 2) To bring together youth workers, young people and decision-makers from our municipalities to initiate debate stimulating political decision making in the field of youth friendly cities. 3) To stimulate urban development with the special focus on youth and enagage young people into urban planning. The project is directed to municipalities, youth workers and civil society actors from our regions (min. 20 actors), as well as young people - final beneficiary of youth friendly cities. assessed impact will embrace minimum 200 public officers and municipality employers and over 20 000 young people living in targeted municipalities. The project structure will consist of 2 transnational project meetings and 1 training course for staff on implementation methods of collected best practices, as well as research at a national level identifying best practices. The product of this project will be a publication collecting all best practices together with recommendations on their implementation.
The goals of the project were: 1) Collecting the best practices for implementing the criteria of youth-friendly cities in various dimensions, e.g. infrastructure, youth participation and co-management, youth education and opportunities, youth rights protection, health and information to inspire and encourage local youth policy making 2) Gathering youth workers, young people and decision makers from our cities / municipalities to initiate a debate to stimulate political decision making in the field of youth-friendly cities, 3) Stimulating the development of cities with particular emphasis on young people and involving young people in planning the development of their communities.
The project responded to the growing trend in Europe of developing urban policies towards youth and strategic city planning in accordance with the standards of youth-friendly cities - we wanted to develop it, involve organizations, specialists, cities and young people in it, and find out and inspire how to do it well / better. The project aimed to collect good practice from several European cities on how to make their cities 'youth friendly' in many dimensions. We wanted to find out how cities do it, what regulations have adopted to introduce youth-friendly policies in their policies, how they implement it, who does it, and above all - what is the role and position of young people in this process. We wanted to create an international platform for mutual support in this area and generate the political will to make political decisions leading to more youth-friendly cities. That is why we gathered partners deeply involved in the mission of developing youth policies at the local level, we invited representatives of cities, regions, decision-makers as well as young people and young activists to think about how cities can be more youth-friendly.