Inter Alia’s strategy for Youth | 2024-2026
Youth is connected to change, experimentation and fluidity. Social, economic and cultural circumstances constitute “youth” a diverse experience as to its duration and the space for exploration it provides. Still, the period between the dependency of childhood and the “independence” of adulthood is always formative for youngsters and their emotional, social and professional development.
Υouth is the only target group of Inter Alia’s work that is constant and cuts across all streams of work and activities. We seek to empower youngsters to articulate their needs and shape their environments by inspiring and enabling civic and political engagement and by facilitating the discovery and use of relevant skills and competences. Since 2013, Inter Alia has been providing educational and other skills-related experiences, building and developing a strong and ever-growing community of like-minded individuals and organisations.
Connecting with and supporting informal youth groups of young people: Several EU funding programmes (e.g., Erasmus+, CERV) duly identify grassroots actors as key for upholding European values and guaranteeing the quality of democracy. Through outreaching campaigns and by addressing youth that were previously involved in projects or continuous structures of Inter Alia (e.g. Council of Members, Youth Pool), we will create working groups and support them with knowhow, training and financing to organise small-scale actions. In line with our strategic objectives for political engagement and education, we will strive to involve grassroots actors to our advanced programmes for political education such as the Roots Winter School and will incorporate their inputs in building our advocacy agenda and bottom-up actions for social change. Moreover, Inter Alia will maintain and extend its connection with grassroots organisations. We will promote their actions and disseminate their work and agenda through our network while enabling their contact to decision makers.
Connecting with and supporting youth within formal educational institutions: In line with our strategy for education, we see education as a political act. We recognise the need to promote political critical education within the formal educational institutions. The content and methods used in school and university environments are more often than not obsolete and passive, thus inappropriate for young learners. Inter Alia will intensify its efforts to diversify the methods used in classes either by offering workshops and lessons to students directly or by offering alternative pedagogical approaches to teachers and professors. We will will mobilise intersectional and participatory methodologies in order to promote youth participation and increase the agency of children and youth. Inter Alia will maintain its role as a Eurodesk multiplier in Athens and the Peloponnese and the resulting collaboration with schools and universities in the respective regions
Funding of CSOs active in the field of youth: According to the Erasmus+ 2021-2027 Annual Report 2022, organisations involved are fundamental in implementing the programme, supporitng participants in their mobility and also in taking part in projects on cooperation and policy building in the domain of Education and Training. Projects mainly support young people’s personal development, skills development and increased employability. We see that funding channels play a key role in this. When it comes to Erasmus+ actions in the field of youth, resources available under “Mobility” and “Cooperation” are almost exclusively invested directly into CSOs, leading to a significant improvement in the level of services provided. On the contrary, accessible funds under the “Policy” key action is a small fragment of the overall budget, leading to modest policy inputs on decision-making provided by CSOs. Individual mobility keeps being a central component of Erasmus+, but strategies still need to be further developed to ensure that underrepresented groups, including individuals with disabilities and those coming from marginalised communities, have effective access to Erasmus+ opportunities. This shortcoming has also been underlined by the European Parliament’s Report on the implementation of the Erasmus+ programme 2021-2017. Not enough resources are available for projects under KA3 (only 1%, equivalent to 7.8 million euros, in 2022), therefore reducing the possibility of CSOs to connect young people with decision makers and to support the implementation of the EU youth policy agenda. CSOs are, thus, lagging behind as actors in the field of policy, in mainstreaming youth work, and in reaching out to youth with fewer opportunities. We rarely encounter coordinated bottom-up campaigns to challenge EU policies for youth, the fora available for exchange between policy makers and CSOs are scarce and fragmented, the institutional recognition of youth work varies greatly among member states while inequality and social exclusion in a great part of the Union is on the rise.
Project-based funding reflects the need for measurable results and tangible progress and is indeed in line with fast-changing circumstances in the realities of youngsters. When it comes both to policy work and to reaching out to and maintaining the commitment of people with fewer opportunities, however, reliance on projects creates uncertainty. As a result, Erasmus+ does not include marginalised youth or their needs and inputs to the extent needed for tackling inequalities and fostering equal access to services and resources. Besides, there is a lack of participatory policy making mechanisms open to youth and CSOs in a mainly representational system. To an extent, this is because available funding to organisations for work in the field of policy is very limited. Organisations lack resources for carrying out research, need analysis and impact assessment that are essential to be able to contribute essentially in policy debate in a continuous and structured manner. Thus, in line with the strategy for political engagement, we emphasise our advocacy/policy efforts in promoting: a) more balance between operational and project-based funding to youth organisations; and b) more evidence as to the effectiveness of different funding channels. Operational support to youth CSOs could enable them to be a more visible and dependable actor, and engage youngsters in a more profound way, thus promoting their direct participation in common affairs at all levels.
Capacity building of CSO workers: Given the ongoing systematisation and centralisation of EU policies associated with youth, coordinated action by civil society actors is necessary to act effectively and contribute to the implementation of these policies. We aim to create a secondary, wider but looser network, with similar priorities and perceptual and methodological approaches, and to promote their policy engagement and advocacy capacities. Setting off from the approach and methodologies laid out in our education strategy, individual CSOs, as well as networks and unions of actors and stakeholders in the third sector active at local, national, and European level, will participate in capacity building activities and be informed about and invited to contribute in policy-related actions and our advocacy agenda. They will benefit from new capacities in the field of advocacy cultivated through targeted educational activities and practice (by engaging with Inter Alia’s campaigns) as well as from the replicable, freely accessible intellectual materials produced for peers and their beneficiaries. At the same time, Inter Alia will enrich and diversify its educational methods and tools through the inputs of peers.
Deepening connections to policy and decision makers: Open channels of interaction between decision makers and citizens and civil society enables decision-making that promotes social peace and integration. Inter Alia will continue monitoring the actions of committees whose work affect youth and publish research and policy reports on them. We will be involved in the crucial in-between process of receiving feedback from citizens and civil society which can improve policies. Inter Alia will promote deliberative democracy by pushing policy makers to open processes to the public and facilitate citizens’ involvement. The connection between civil society and their nations’ Members of European Parliament as well as the European Parliament committees, is of utmost importance for the future of representation in the EU. We will utilise and extend existing channels of communication with policy and decision makers at the EU level (such as the Committee on Culture and Education, Directorate General of Education, Youth, Sport and Culture). A similar process will be applied to national Members of Parliament. In this way, through pushing for extending participatory democratic practices, we will enable policy makers to produce better targeted and more effective policies which respond to the needs of citizens. Moreover, through targeted training and learning-by-doing, peers in Inter Alia’s network will be supported in stepping up their own interactions with decision makers and also in creating their own spaces, discourses and actions for challenging existing policies, practices and, eventually, power structures. We will continue to participate in the Erasmus+ coalition, an informal network of CSOs in the field of Youth and Education and Training, that monitors and advocates for effective policies in the respective fields. For the foreseeable future, we will maintain our role as an ambassador of the European Citizens Initiative in Greece.
Offering training and visibility to discriminated groups: Intersectionality is an approach adopted in Inter Alia’s work with youth. It applies to all our processes and activities to the effect that we view all participants as carriers of several different identities (often controversial to one another) which should not be assumed, and should be ideally explored and unravelled. Groups that are being discriminated against due to intersecting identities they carry are usually the least represented in the public discourse while their life experiences discourage them from claiming their rights publicly. We will offer the platform and the circumstances for these individuals and groups to express their needs and share their perspectives with communities and policy-making institutions, and press for them to be taken into account. Moreover, our training activities will prioritise reaching out to youth belonging to the aforementioned groups. Groups such as Roma, the disabled, LGBTQI+ people, asylum seekers, refugees and migrants will be targeted both individually, through specialised activities, and collectively, as groups that suffer oppression under the existing power structure. We will listen to their stories and offer practical skills and feedback on ideas and projects that they can later apply in their own communities. In this framework, an internal working group on Intersectionality and Gender will be created while Inter Alia will continue its work as a member of the Greek national agency for youth’s Working Group on Inclusion and Diversity Erasmus+/Youth & European Solidarity Corps.