From Rural to Plural 🌿

Partnership Building Activity, which brought together youth workers from 14 different countries, was successfully completed in Romania! There were 4 of us from Estonia: representatives of Ethos, and also, it seems, we are expecting new members to the team 😉

But why did we come here? We were actually interested to come to develop specific skills to work with rural youth and connect to our European Youth Village program – a strategic program coordinated by Active Development Association and Go Free Association from Romania.

The first day we, of course, devoted to getting to know each other and creating an atmosphere for further work, and from the second day the hard work began! We learned about how the program works, how this initiative was born in the first place, what difficulties the organizations hosting us faced at the beginning of their journey, and how they overcame them.

It was interesting! How else to convey practical knowledge and skills, if not through personal example? The idea is that organizations that came to the project, interested in working with young people from rural regions, could adapt the program and bring it back to their countries. The impact could grow significantly if we could take the program to the international level, because as we have seen here, in many European countries the problems regarding rural youth opportunities are very similar. And it would be great to find solutions to these problems together.

The EUROPEAN YOUTH VILLAGE program aims to create dialogue between the community members and the institutional actors of the village and to encourage the initiative from young people to the rest of the stakeholders involved in the process, developing new opportunities for young people, by young people.

But what’s great is that here we not only learned about practices in other countries, but also had the opportunity to create new joint initiatives for future projects. Thus, Ethos is involved now in a youth exchange with Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Portugal and Spain on the topic of combating stereotypes and inclusion, which will take place in Spain approximately in September this year. Who wants to join? 😄

We're leaving, but we're staying in touch! We will refine our ideas and see where new partnerships take us! Thank you very much for the experience and taking care of us during this week, and hope to see you all in the future!