The Youth Workspace project is a strategic cooperation project between Estonia, Lithuania and Turkey, bringing together the world of work and youth to find common ground for their activities through jointly created innovation. This common feature brings young people to the knowledge of flexible working methods, which are increasingly being introduced alongside traditional work arrangements (remote working, co-working centers, short work week, work time slots, etc.). NEETs and other young people with fewer opportunities are a target group for whom decent working practices could be a solution to being involved in society. The reason lies in the various obstacles that hinder them from the tradition of basic work (special needs, social and economic barriers, taking care for the family, etc.). Innovative new work environments can be a solution for young people to participate in new forms of work and entrepreneurship. Different collaborative solutions and innovative social change in the community are needed to create such new synergies. Youth workers working with young people must also be prepared to address these issues among young people and to support their integration into working life. To bring change, the project will include three study visits to participating countries, training on social innovation and change management. An e-guide will be developed to map and gather common knowledge, ideas and synergies, including recommendations for communities to develop synergies between youth and work and to work with each other. In addition, videos will be produced that bring new ways of working and their relevance to the public in order to increase communities' willingness to change. At the end of the project, there will be three dissemination events and a Hackathon, based on the information and conclusions gathered during the project and providing ideas for community innovation for the next steps. The project is important in international cooperation because working has crossed borders and the world of work in innovative approaches is further away than the space where the work takes place. The project is based on a design method that is divided into four phases - discover, define, develop and distribute. The discovery process will collect experiences and practices from each country, including study visits, identify commonalities at the definition stage, analyse development opportunities, generate ideas on how different working life models might fit young people, and in what contexts and how these issues should be brought to youth community. It will bring interesting innovative ideas to prepare young people for work and to collaborate with institutions practicing new ways of working or providing an environment for innovative work solutions. Study visits include 18 participants from each country, 6 participants from each country to training course, 3-5 workshops modules will be created to introduce new techniques to young people, an e-manual and videos, and at least 40 people participating in dissemination events per country. Project period: 1st September 2020 - 31th March 2022.
We wanted to bring together several stakeholders to find the common understanding and innovation for intervention to rise the young people readiness for remote work. We wanted to understand the potential of the youth work to offer support and develop the skills for youth work. We wanted to learn more about the remote work and understand the concept and the connection with community work and youth work. We wanted to rise the awareness of the remote work and its potential for young people, specially NEETs, who has sometimes difficulties and obstacles to move away from their homevillage. Remote work is potential for them but understanding how through youth work we can support it was not so clear so far. It was important to realize this project in internationally. This approach helped us to understand remote work concept from the different countries aspect and practices. We wanted to see how remote treated in the practice of different countries, because remote work is a concept that crosses the borders of countries.
This project was applied because the number of NEET-youth in society was increasing, specially during the project period in the context of Covid-19. Covid-19 affected the participation of young people in education and working life, because in education young people could not cope with self-directed learning and the connection and relationship with fellow students was lost, and in the labor market they lost their jobs because they worked directly in the service sector, which suffered greatly during Covid-19. These are practices that we saw during the implementation of the project, but which confirmed the reasons why the project was implemented. Remote working is the growing form of activity, but the skills required for this and the potential of remote work in work with young people are not discussed. The need of the project was to understand the common concept of remote work for young people; how to through youth work and community work support young people potential to remote work; how to develop skills for remote work so, that young people are more prepared for the labour market, specially from the remote areas; how remote work can help to overcome the barriers to learn or study, what kind of support the youth need.