The international youth council seminar in Tampere is over for more then an week now and for me it is time to write down a little bit what I experienced. There are some things I mentioned on previous blog posts as well, but this should be the last one.
From here a big thanks to the organisers at nuva ry. It is always difficult to organise such an europe spanning event, involving participants from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Finnland, Lithuania and bring them all togehter to do something. a total of about 40 young people. The participants were between 15-30 years old and work in the local youth local councils or similar democratically elected bodies. Already youth councils have a very strong foothold in several countries or regions in Europe exist umbrella organisations and other bodies.
Of course we didn’t only work, we had a lot of fun as well, the following video, which the finns all love is a testament to that:
Funding
We had a very interesting presentation by a lady from CIMO, which is the Finish organisation with distributes the funding for European Youth in Action Programmes.
youth exchanges
Generally this programmes cover 75% of the costs and are intended for young people who met over a theme, such as the environment and should have something to do with learning by doing not only lectures.
youth iniative
Seems to be the easiest way of getting funding. Requires a minimum of 4 young people, who develop an sense of entrepreneurship, can be between 15 – 30 but need a coach if they are under 18, can be formal or informal group and the important info it can be anything.
youth democray project
Needs to be a network of at least two countries with two participating groups each. This groups have to be financially independent of each other. Participants can be between 13 – 30 years of age. And we need at least 16 participants. YiA will carry 75% of the costs.
training and networking forcus for thise in youth work
Can be a study visit, job shadowing or a seminars, but also possible for planning and feasibility visits as well.
More information can be found for example on the German Website of Youth in Action: http://www.jugend-in-aktion.de/aktionsbereiche/
Conclusion
Apparently one of the feedback formulas mentioned: „Sebastian does interesting research“. I really hope my research is interesting (otherwise I wouldn’t have the nerve to do it) and will help build this networking across European countries.
But still for that the seminar was really interesting and gave me new motivation and the necessary network to connect all this together and do some meaningful participation. I hope we can use this funding information especially to get some kind of seminar together in the future.