n.2019-1-IT03-KA205-015817

Protecting the environment is important for 93% of European youths (15-39), 78% of them agree that environmental issues have a direct effect on their daily life and their health and 86,5% of them agree that they can play a role in protecting the environment and 68% of them also feel that citizens themselves are not doing enough to protect the environment - Eurobarometer ( 2017).

 

"Start from where young people are" is the youth worker's mantra, therefore Environmental protection and awareness is an important concern for many youth organisations across Europe, even if not all of them rate it as their first priority and the youth workers’ ability to support youth green actions is becoming more and more relevant.

 

On an internal analysis within the project consortium about the main problems/difficulties encountered by the youth workers, emerged difficulties in motivating young people to overcome the gap between intention and participation in volunteering actions, difficulties in keeping the youth involved in a long-term perspective, need of knowledge about different green social actions or how to organize them, lack of experience in making the social actions accessible for young people from different backgrounds.

 

Green youth's promoters wants to provide the youth organizations and their youth workers with needed background of knowledge, ability and skills that make them able to effectively promote and support young people's commitment in the environment protection field in order to empower and support them in leading and initiating green actions.

Therefore our partnership wants to collect information, tips, tools, methods and strategies (originated from the partners' previous experiences in the project topic) that can improve the quality of youth work in the specific area of environmental protection and awareness, strengthening the international cooperation and better quality of the actions undertaken by the partners but also providing the youth organizations with a theoretical and practical base to start to implement actions in this area being able to meet the young people's needs and to involve wide groups of young volunteers.

 

Furthermore, thanks to the mixture of physical and intellectual activities that compose the several forms that youth environmental actions can take and thanks to the inclusive approaches shared inside the partnership the project will be able to increase the partners and direct/indirect beneficiaries' ability to reach and actively involve young people with fewer opportunities in an inclusive perspective of volunteering and youth work. Young people with disability, social obstacles or migrants sometimes face psychological or social barriers in joining the mainstream youth organization with the result that they tend to join organizations specifically addressing a given target group: Green youth's promoters wants to contribute to lay down this kind of barriers providing the youth workers, youth leaders and adult volunteers with the ability to create inclusive atmospheres and non-discriminating situations.

 

The cooperation among youth workers from different countries will allow to share experiences, problems and solutions, deepening the use of different tools, methods, activities about the involvement of young people in environmental protection and awareness activities and in supporting their entrepreneurship in this area; these tools will be generalized and applied in the partner organizations during the project itself, laying the foundations for an European shared inclusive and high quality youth work with a special focus on environment.