“Reactive youth: Rural Entrepreneurship, Active Citizenship and Territories Identity Visibility through the Engagement of Youth” project intends to process recommendations, develop outputs and implement activities that could make possible a bottom-up approach in rural areas towards their development through rural networking between youth and social stakeholders. The project gives the opportunity to youth in remote areas to express their opinion, needs, worries and the way they see the world and become active citizens, thinking in their context but with a global perspective.
Ultimately the project objectives are:
The project aims to empower youth living in rural areas as change makers of their communities towards more sustainable social and economic models. By promoting their civic engagement and structured dialogue with social actors, youth will be able to share their creativity and entrepreneurship to create employment and training opportunities for them on their regions by taking advantage of their natural and cultural richness, contributing to their growing and stopping their depopulation.
The expected results are:
Result 1:Policy Brief towards Rural Areas Development & Sustainability through Youth Participation
It’s a key tool that combines in a synthetic way all the results and materials from the Initial Researches carried out in all partners areas focused on the assessment of the local communities real needs and the potential ways to tackle them through youth participation based on the feedback of all the actors involved on them. On it Local Authorities, Civil Society Organisations and youth have been consulted to assess their needs and allow project partners to develop learning materials that could tackle them.
Result 2: Youth Worker Toolkit Towards Youth Engagement In Rural Areas
A manual with materials adapted to the needs of youth workers and educators working on rural areas based on non-formal methods with the aim to increase the quality of the youth services on those regions. Specifically, it will be based on a trasnational training of youth professionals and consecutively on local workshops that are focused on the awareness raising among youth about the added value of their areas towards leisure time, tourism, and cultural activities (especially related to environmental protection and promotion) that will at the same time build on them a common identity related to the belonging of each territory.
Result 3:Identity Maps
Interactive maps of the partner`s areas that capture the regional identity and promote the interaction and development of all the local communities living there e.g. on an island, a Valley, or a mountain, marking its main places of interest, cultural values or even gastronomy. All these will be detected by young people containing places of interest will be linked to videos, audios, images or texts of local people. They will promote the cultural identity of each area while giving added value to the youth role on them and highlighting the main attractiveness for newcomers.
The project activities are:
The project will develop different activities like researching, transnational and local workshops, visibility events, intersectorial meetings and the creation of Interactive maps that capture cultural elements of each region and promote youth active participation on the rural areas on which the project takes place. These activities will engage youth by providing them the competences and skills needed to identify, design, discuss and implement youth initiatives with local stakeholders and community members that could generate opportunities for them in terms of training and employment.