The project Partnership for Sustainable Strengthening of Youth Activism aims to strengthen the role of young people in directly influencing policies that affect them, as well as to enable them to develop lifelong skills that will facilitate their responsible and active participation in society and motivate them to develop their own projects and initiatives. In addition, the aim of the project is to develop new methods of civil society organizations and youth organizations with the aim of improving the quality of work with young people and activists through methodological manuals and innovative digital solutions (e-repositories with materials, e-counseling for youth policies and applications which simulate the decision-making process in politics). It will enable young people to sustainably transfer knowledge to new generations in the field of advocacy, youth movements and their self-organization through an activist youth school and accompanying innovative educational content online. Another important goal of the project is to connect civil society and initiatives of youth, student and high school organizations and greater cross-sectoral synergy with the aim of involving young people more actively in the process of public policy-making and community participation. The project was conceived and will be implemented by 4 civil society organizations: Youth Initiative for Human Rights (Croatia), Gong (Croatia), Youth Centre CK13 (Novi Sad, Serbia) and Danes je nov dan (Slovenia). The project will involve socially active young people between the ages of 16 and 30 who have previously shown initiative to gather and work with other young people and make contributions to positive societal change. Also, special attention will be paid to the equal inclusion of young people from groups with fewer opportunities and groups at risk of social exclusion. The results of the project include the Summer Schools of Advocacy and Organization for Youth, which is a seven-day program that will include a combination of theoretical lectures, workshops, discussions and exercises, and networking of young people in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. Both schools will be attended by 80 young people. One of the important results of the project is a Practical Guide to Working with Young Activists, whose purpose is to provide youth workers insight into the process of working with youth and to provide them with practical solutions and examples for organizing a youth education program. In parallel with the Guide for working with young activists, an interactive manual for dealing with public policies will be created from the perspective of activists and advocacy organizations. The aim of this guide will be to provide young people with the necessary knowledge to understand the decision-making process. Additionally, all content of summer schools will be available on a web-based platform which will include recordings of all lectures, which can also be used as a platform for knowledge transfer among youth engaged in activism and advocacy. Also, two important innovative and interactive results of the project will be an application that simulates the policy decision-making process and an e-counseling platform in the field of youth policy.The long-term benefit of this project is the communication and activist platform that will be formed as a direct consequence of the project's activities and intellectual results. Young people will be interconnected and empowered to participate actively in socio-political processes in their communities. The transnational character of the project is related to the exchange of good experiences that will contribute to the creation of innovative content built on different expertise and experiences of project partners. In terms of youth activism and participation, there are different field experiences of youth groups in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, whose connection will greatly contribute to the quality of materials as well as discussions at the summer school and virtual platforms. It will also be an opportunity to apply different models of organization and decision-making to digital platform design, which will be tested in multiple countries, creating innovative pre-adapted materials for wider use across Europe, and possibly beyond. For example, the e-counseling platform for young people and the “Stop Your Government” game built in this way, so that it can be easily adapted to different national contexts, will be easily applied in any other country interested in the project, which will also increase the sustainability of project results. Ultimately, the innovation of this project represents a synergy of virtual and physical content that simultaneously addresses the political literacy of young people, activist education and the transfer of knowledge. Using gamification methods, applications and e-counseling platform will approach young people in an innovative way, while addressing burning social issues.
The goal of this project was to strengthen the role of young people in directly influencing the policies that apply to them, as well as to enable them to develop lifelong skills that will facilitate their responsible and active participation in society and motivate them to develop their own projects and initiatives. In addition, the goal of the project was the development of new methods of civil society organizations and youth organizations and for youth with the aim of improving the quality of work with young people and activists using methodological manuals and innovative digital solutions (virtual platforms and repositories with materials and video games that simulate political processes ). We tried to enable the sustainable transfer of knowledge to new generations in the field of advocacy, youth movements and their self-organization by means of an activist school for young people and accompanying innovative educational content online. Another important achieved goal of the project was the connection of civil society and the initiatives of youth, student and high school organizations, as well as greater intersectoral synergy with the goal of more active involvement of young people in the process of making public policies and participation in the community. In addition, the project created widely applicable innovative methods for raising the quality of work with young people. The project also wanted to enable young people from Hr. SLO, and SR to meet and get to know their peers, and through the acquired acquaintances and friendships to transform and raise the awareness of young people and create the assumptions of a different view of the social and political problems faced by young people throughout the region.
This project was designed and implemented by 4 civil society organizations from Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia: Youth Initiative for Human Rights (Croatia), Gong (Croatia), CK13 (Novi Sad) and Danes je nov dan (Slovenia). In preparing the application for this project, in discussions with student and youth organizations in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, it was determined that there are several key problems in the field of youth engagement in participation in decision-making processes that relate to them. The results of several researches conducted between 2015 and 2019 showed that the key problems affecting the insufficient interest of young people for more active involvement in society and public policies are: lack of political literacy and competence for formulating advocacy priorities and ways of influencing policies and active participation in society among young people in general; weak transfer of youth knowledge from generation to generation about advocacy and organizing due to the lack of a sustainable knowledge transfer mechanism and a platform that would enable this. By detecting these problems, project activities were created with the aim of reducing them among the youth population directly and indirectly covered by this project. Through the project, the active participation of young people was also encouraged who, due to economic obstacles, cannot do so to such an extent actively participate in various forms of activism and organizations. Also, the partner organizations responded to their internal needs: strengthening capacity for work with young people, developing new methodologies and tools for the work of people who work with young people as well as for the work of young people with young people, as well as tools that can serve internally as on-boarding guides .