Empowering youth workers and youth organisations to contribute to reducing excessive alcohol and drug use, and their consequences on young people's well-being, physical and mental health, is of crucial importance to Europe. However, young people are often considered passive recipients of health promotion interventions, and the involvement of youth organisations in public health initiatives is insufficient. The proposed project - You4Health! - aims to address this need by providing youth workers with the necessary skills to implement effective health promotion interventions, and empower them to be actively involved in public health. The project team plans to do this by: 1) Mapping the field of youth-led alcohol/drug health promotion interventions in order to provide a list of ready-to-use examples and case-studies; 2) Realising You4Health!, an online training platform for youth workers. The platform will consist of sequenced training modules, guidelines, good practices and case studies, as well as ready-to-use materials for real-life situations, for the design, implementation and evaluation of effective youth-led health projects. All contents will be provided in English and translated into different languages. The You4Health! tools target youth workers and young people. Our approach is based on 'Co-production'. Any project output will be the result of collaboration between partner organisations and youth workers. An advisory group of youth workers from different countries will be actively involved from the beginning to collaborate as co-producer of project outputs, and to pilot the You4Health! web platform. Pilot's participants will represent the first group of youth workers to be trained, and with the aim of having a multiplying effect in their local communities. Overall, this will guarantee usability of the final products, foster a sense of ownership and contribute to achieving the highest reach among European youth organisations. The You4Health! project will increase youth workers' knowledge and critical thinking towards effective programmes, reduce implementation barriers for youth organisations, and increase the proportion of empowered youth workers in taking the initiative towards health promotion. In the long run, You4Health! will increase the number and quality of youth-led health projects and raise the broader conversation in society about young people's health issues, make young people more involved in public health, and ultimately have a positive impact on the young population health.
This project’s key long-term goal was to empower members of youth organisations to contribute to reducing excessive alcohol and drug use, and their consequences on young people's well-being, physical and mental health. We aimed to a) raise awareness among young people and volunteers on the importance of incorporating health-related initiatives in various aspects and fields of youth; b) give them the necessary skills and competencies to develop and implement effective youth-led health projects. This contributes to increased quality within youth organisations and ultimately foster youth active involvement in civic and social life. By actively involving young people/youth workers (bottom-up approach) You4Health! aimed to provide them with youth-oriented training (consisting in the two project’s intellectual outputs) to realise health promotion interventions in their local communities. Such training also includes examples of alcohol/drug effective interventions that are applicable to real life situations of youth organisations.
Alcohol and drugs represent a major threat to young people’s health and wellbeing. Results of our need analysis indicated that youth organisations would like to contribute to alcohol and drug prevention, but most of them lack the tools to implement effective iniatives. There are also barriers to their involvement due a largely dominant problem-focused top-down perspective in public health that tend to consider individuals – and young people in particular –as essentially passive and in need of protection or stigmatised for their (un)healthy behaviours We concluded that youth organisations needed support and guidance to choose the right interventions that are feasible and effective, and empower them to be actively involved in Public Health. For these reasons, we applied for this project. It is important to mobilise all resources in our society, including members of youth organisations and young people in general. Youth organisations are in the right position of promoting young people’s health (e.g., they are very good at engaging peers).