Study Visit | Boosting Youth Participation at Local Level

This study visit is mostly targeting youth leaders, youth workers and youth municipality officers. Moreover, the participants must: • Be able to work in English; • Be willing to contribute with their experience to the visit; • Be coming from Sweden, Portugal, Turkey, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Netherlands, Malta, Italy – no other counties can be accepted at this stage. The central learning objective of this visit to Portimão is to better enable the participants to set up projects, programmes and long-term strategies and approaches, in order to increase youth participation in rural areas and on long term strategies and approaches. The specific objectives of this study visit are: • To explore, experience and understand the specific challenges to youth participation in geographically remote areas. • To visit examples of good practices and based upon interaction with the project organisations, filter out elements to transfer to each participant’s own reality • To think of innovative ways of youth participation in remote areas (new technologies, long-distance tools, etc.). • To offer possibilities for long term partnership building for future projects, among organisations active in the field of youth participation. This visit will thus create a learning space to focus on: (i) increasing young people participation in the decision-making processes, and thus their ownership of the local realities; as well as (ii) on measures to apply during the implementation of selected projects to offer more opportunities to geographically isolated youth, to support young families and young people to either stay or return to the countryside and gain their livelihoods through local employment and entrepreneurship, user-driven and self-organized initiatives.