- Assessment of mobile youth work, alternative forms of socio-spatial youth work and digital youth work/online streetwork - Development of quality standards for the three areas for German-speaking countries - Description and discussion of developments and changing conditions in open youth work in public spaces in recent years (differentiation between urban and rural areas) - Description of the potential and development opportunities for open youth work in public spaces (offline and online) - Discussion of good practice in the representation of mobile youth work/youth street work within open youth work - Support for funding structures in quality development and evaluation, as well as in defining forms of open youth work - Strengthening cross-border cooperation through a common understanding of forms of open youth work and coordinated strategies for further development
The background to this project was the desire to survey, describe and further develop forms of professional open youth work (OJA) in public, semi-public and digital spaces. While professional open youth work in youth centers and clubs is considered an obvious part of open youth work, mobile youth work is found in various specialist areas (youth, social affairs, child and youth welfare, community) and thus has a heterogeneous understanding of the form of service with correspondingly inconsistent quality and qualification requirements. Online streetwork, on the other hand, is a still very young but highly relevant field that is practised here and there on a small scale and first had to be described. The project's objectives were articulated on the one hand by the youth workers themselves, but also by the umbrella organisations of professional open youth work in German-speaking countries and colleagues from the academia. However, our focus is always on the needs of the young people themselves, to whom we want to offer relevant and contemporary support and guidance with the activities of professional open youth work that should be as tailored as possible to their spaces and living environments.