01-07/03/2016 - Seminar "Youth-led projects – sharing best practices" (Palermo, Italy)

The international Seminar “Youth-led projects – sharing best practices” has been planned with the main aim of starting a virtuous process to develop the skills of European organizations in the field of youth-led project management. A strong network of youth organizations and young leaders will be created, that will cooperate in a long term perspective becoming a resource also for the other organizations all over Europe who wants to grow in this field.

Specific objectives:
- sharing a common understanding of youth participation, European active citizenship and youth-led projects for community development, focusing on a gender sensitive approach and use of different media.
- increasing the knowledge of best practices on how to develop successful youth-led projects around Europe and foster the skills of youth organizations and informal groups;
- to create a network of organizations that will cooperate in a long term prospective on this topic becoming a resource for the other organizations all over Europe.

The international Seminar will be held in Palermo from 1 to 7 March 2016 and will gather 20 participants from 20 European countries. The project is targeted to youth workers, youth trainers, project managers and youth leaders who have the competences to share detailed information about youth-led projects in their communities, as he/she has participated in the project with a main role. There will be one participant from each country in order to cover a huge part of Council of Europe member countries and to share very diversified perspective and work methods.

As established by Council of Europe, the age limit to participate in the project is 30 (there will be space for 5 people over 30 years old). The gender balance will be ensured by trying to select an equal number of female and male participants.

This Seminar is the first phase of a long-term project, made of three activities: a Seminar, a Training Course and a Local Implementation period, lasting 1 year in total.
Some of the organizations that will participate to this seminar will be involved in the following phases of this project.

The participants to the Seminar will develop a toolkit of shared best practices and methodologies for the gender sensitive empowerment of youngsters and their involvement in participating to community development. The contents of the Toolkit will be also transferred to an App for smartphones. Toolkit and App will then be used as methodological manual for the delivering of the training course. All the participants to the TC will then participate in a local implementation phase where they will act as multipliers, transferring their skills to groups of 20 local youngsters through peer-to-peer education.

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