Our partnership set out to try and understand the reasons for this disparity as described above and to begin to develop methods of including these youths, responding to the areas of need they identified and also the opportunities they presented to us as preferred ways we could engage with them. At the outset of the project we we were aware of many barriers to participation in EU programmes for young people in our countries (in particular those with fewer opportunities) but we did not wholly understand what these barriers were as we have never performed any formal research into the subject. We were just aware that young people with barriers to inclusion only access Erasmus+ and ESC when they were individually targeted and walked through the programme. Through GAP we wished to undertake research to discover what these barriers are in order to start to plan routes to overcome them. Our final aim related to raising the quality of international youthwork by sharing good practice between organisations - this was done through the physical and online meetings regularly taking place throughout the project and also through the pilot activities where we mobilised youths between partner organisations.
We are three small organisations in the French and Dutch overseas regions and territories Tur Cos Ta Posibel on Aruba, Voice of the Youth Sint Maarten and Peupl'en Harmonie French Guiana. Each of these organisations are grass roots organisations with a passion for inclusion and a significant player in local community youthwork. Each partner is also one of the main local players in Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps in their country, but all appreciate the activities in these programmes in each country is very small compared to that in France and the Netherlands. Each partner had independently identified the lack of take up in their communities of Erasmus+ and ESC, in particular with young people who had additional barriers to inclusion (as well as geographical - a barrier for our entire population being situated in overseas territories.)