Our main objective is to strengthen the skills of youth workers working with Roma youth, to increase the capacity of partner organisations and to develop innovative methods to promote career guidance for marginalised young people, to strengthen their motivation, perseverance and soft skills (e.g. teamwork, cooperation, communication, critical thinking) for better employability. The project will also contribute to a better quality of youth work through wider dissemination. An important part of the project is the international exchange of experiences and dissemination of good practices: cooperation between partner countries has provided an opportunity to share and further develop good practices that can be applied later by other communities in their own context. The project as a whole aimed to promote young people's success in school and start in life, while contributing to reducing social exclusion and unemployment at European level.
The project was designed to address two major social problems: the high drop-out rate of disadvantaged young people and the skills gap that hinders their entry into the labour market. The partner organisations identified similar challenges in their local communities: high drop-out rates, often driven by lack of motivation, learning failure and social disadvantage; lack of employability skills such as self-awareness, communication, problem-solving and cooperation - which schools often lack the space and opportunity to develop. An important challenge is the under-use of non-formal education methods, which offer an effective learning alternative for the hardest-to-reach young people; young people's vision, self-confidence and life goals are often lacking. The project has responded to these problems by aiming to provide methodological support to youth workers, to expand non-formal learning opportunities and to implement a comprehensive development programme that contributes to the prevention of early school leaving and to the successful entry of young people into the labour market.