The project is aimed at supporting and strengthening the position of young people in the society. During the project, research and educational activities will be carried out using innovative methods to find out from young people their ideas about the future in 2035. In this way, young people will have the opportunity to discover their potential, their key role in society and bringing the change. The specific area of youth researched will be selected on the basis of a survey, which they perceive as the most interesting/hot topic. It can be e.g. How will young people spend their free time in 2035? How will young people be educated in 2035? etc. During the project, 5 intellectual outputs will be produced, while the final output will be a story consisting of various visions of the future and positive examples, based on data and a collective futuristic imagination. At the same time, the results will be presented to youth workers and other important and relevant key players to open their minds to opportunities as seen by young people themselves, and will be a kind of basis for creating longer-term strategy documents or supporting long-term strategic planning. It is mainly about changing the thinking and paradigm of how we work with young people. Focusing on the distant future as well. How to work with desired ideas, create and design them, let young people (but also the public) allow themselves to create such an idea and this is the first step in making it happen. At the same time, not just wait for the future to come, and wait for what it will be like (or predict it), but start actively co-creating it.
What we have achieved is that we have tested and experimented with the concept of the future as a tool to develop young people's competences but also to create so-called prototypes or alternative scenarios of the future. These are meant to stimulate debate about what kind of future we want and to help social transformations. Which was much more over the top than we had expected, as we were rather expecting to do with the concept of the future in the context of trend research. However, during the course of the project we found that we were going much further than that and the project was helping to develop a core competency needed for a rapidly changing world. This is also why Unesco has recognised futures literacy as a 21st century competence. In addition, there has been a very significant shift in both organisations. The way the Belgian partners look back on it is that it is only because of this project that they have managed to survive the post-covid aftermath, they probably would have disappeared. This project was an inspiration for them, a space to focus on important aspects in the organisation, a great mirroring of processes and functioning, but most importantly a support to involve young people in the project, where the outputs were made as participatory as possible. For YW it is especially a space to transfer know how from abroad, to try out and experiment with completely new tools like art and the future, and to prepare the ground for transfer to youth work in Slovakia.
The project "Future of Youth 2035" is based on the TrendWatch Youth project, as a natural continuation and extension. The reason why we decided to implement this project was that we see the importance of continuing the work we started on trend mapping in the lives of young people. It is a sociological qualitative research on newly emerging phenomena, and what influence and impact they have on the culture, experience and behaviour of youth. When trends are presented we are often faced with the expectation of instant solutions on how to respond to trends, which is not realistic to provide given the diversity of youth work but also of young people. At the same time, we also raise the topics of what the future of young people will be and what we need to teach them to do in order to teach them to live in a rapidly changing world. We are naturally drawn to consider what these trends mean for the future when we are trend mapping, as this is one of the aspects we take into account when analysing trends. However, the question of the future was very distant for us and although we had some idea before the project started, a whole new interesting dimension of working with young people and the concept of the future was revealed to us. Young people are the future, but more than 80% of young people think they are not being heard. With this project, we wanted to reflect that by listening to what their ideas of the future are, helping them to create it together and at the same time disseminating it to important adults and those who work with them.