The project was a small-scale cooperation between youth workers and volunteers of grassroots CSOs from Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The aim was to engage young people living in remote/rural areas or facing exclusion. The partners aimed to connect, engage, and empower such young people to address common rural/remote communities’ issues, such as discrimination, irresponsible use of nature, and youth exclusion. The project had three objectives. Firstly, it aimed to enhance the competencies of eight youth workers to address common rural communities’ issues beyond borders. Secondly, it aimed to build the competencies of sixteen youth volunteers to reach out to youth rural/remote communities, promote youth activism, and connect with local policymakers. Finally, it aimed to motivate and empower other youths to undertake sixteen days of activism campaign events with 240 youth offline, 220 online, and local policymakers. The campaign aimed to raise awareness of the issues young people face in rural areas and provide them with a platform to voice their concerns. The campaign events included workshops and local events that helped young people connect, feel included, recognise the EU values and empower them to take action.
When applying, we assessed the necessity to better reach out targeted young people with fewer opportunities, coming from remote or rural areas or facing exclusion, caused by economic barriers. Our youth workers/volunteers were committed to network with other colleagues from similar rural or remote regions. They needed to learn new or improved solutions to meet the most pressing needs of our rural communities’ caused by geographical isolation, ethnic diversity and irresponsible use of nature. Since we identified these common challenges, we decided to share our experiences, integrate our educational /youth campaign practices to tackle remote/rural communities’ issues. We planned how to Engage and Connect young people through NF transnational or national trainings and then Empower them to organise on/offline campaign events and have 'a say' publicly and digitally. Secondly, we were motivated by the possibilities of the Erasmus + program to transnationally support, through lifelong learning, the educational, professional and personal development of our target youth workers. Thirdly, we expected that due to the program we’d manage to integrate our non-formal educational approaches on the youth needs of inclusion and empowerment.