Celebrating successes, solving problems: representatives from 42 European youth organisations from 14 European countries met in Cologne for five days to evaluate four years of intensive cooperation and plan the next steps for the future. At this year’s network conference of Generation Europe – The Academy, the youth work professionals involved spoke out for maintaining and strengthening this unique combination of local participatory youth projects and European networking.
Initially, 2025 was planned as a year of evaluation and conceptual work for the Generation Europe network. The funding programme for European youth cooperation supports local youth organisations in more than 40 European municipalities in organising local youth groups. The young people involved draw up local action plans and implement them to solve local problems. Alongside this, they met at international youth encounters in all participating municipalities during the years 2022 to 2024 to help each other with their projects and strengthen European civil society.
However, because successful work shouldn’t just end, the participants have decided to continue the local projects in 2025. To kick off a new phase of the programme, international youth encounters will take place again next year. At the network conference in Cologne, the participants compiled their experiences with all parts of the programme in comprehensive evaluation sessions, and then further developed the concept for the new phase.
International Youth Work Needs Support
Generation Europe – The Academy is coordinated by the International Association for Education and Exchange (IBB e.V.). Based in Dortmund, this non-governmental organisation has been organising a network of European youth organisations for 15 years now and supports it in developing methods, training and networking opportunities. While the predecessor funding programme ewoca³ (2009-2017) focused on project partnerships for trilateral work camps, since 2018 Generation Europe has been linking European encounters even more closely with the strengthening of local youth work structures. Jocelyne Jakob, Managing Director of IBB e.V., emphasised at the conference in Cologne that this work will definitely continue beyond the funding phase ending this year, despite the increasingly difficult conditions for international youth work. However, funding for a new programme phase has only been partially secured so far.
How youth work in Europe can be better secured and sustainably financed has been a central topic in the Generation Europe network for some time. At the conference in Cologne, they also presented a comprehensive documentation brochure of the European Youth Work Symposium, which IBB e.V. organised together with its network partners last autumn. Under the motto ‘Building Bridges – Breaking Barriers’, young people, youth work professionals and stakeholders from politics, academia and administration discussed the major problems facing youth work in Europe. In order to be part of the solution, the network partners agreed at the conference in Cologne to continue this advocacy work. One of the next steps will be a Round Table event in Brussels, where young people from the network will have the opportunity to engage in dialogue with politicians and other stakeholders at the European level.
More impressions from the Network Conference in Cologne: