Role and tasks of Contact Points for the Youth in Action programme

The Contact Points are NGOs that have been nominated by SALTO SEE to take up this role. Their main tasks include:

• promoting the Programme and enhancing the visibility of the possibilities for co-operation as well as of projects already organised within the frame of the Programme and
• giving information and advice to project applicants and beneficiaries living in the area of the Contact Point about issues related to how to use the Youth in Action programme as a tool for youth work.

How are the Contact Points selected?

The Contact Points have been selected on the basis of public calls. The fist call was published under the former YOUTH programme in 2005, with a recall for certain regions and countries in 2006. The second call was launched under the Youth in Action programme in 2008. A new public call is planned for the end of 2010.

Training and networking courses for Youth in Action Contact Points

Since 2005, SALTO SEE has brought together the representatives of all Contact Points in regular working meetings, usually on an annual basis. These meetings offer further training, as well as a space for networking and for planning and evaluating their work in this field.

Why Contact Points?

Looking back into history to the beginning of cooperation with South East Europe under the YOUTH programme

Cooperation with SEE became possible with the start of the YOUTH programme (2000 - 2006) in 2000. At this time, only few NGOs in Europe had established partnerships with organisations in countries of SEE. Therefore, SALTO SEE was opened in 2003. Furthermore, the European Commission supported several large scale projects aiming to promote partnership-building and the implementation of the YOUTH programme in South East Europe, in particular:

• youthNET, run by the Interkulturelles Zentrum in Vienna
• Balkan Youth Project, run by the European Youth Forum, Brussels, and Care International, Bosnia and Herzegovina
• ICYE Information project, Brussels
• Community Arts - Between the Lines of SEE, Berlin.

In 2004, the European Commission asked SALTO SEE to initiate and co-ordinate a process that would encourage a more effective use of the existing human resources of these different YOUTH projects for the benefit of the YOUTH programme in South East Europe as a whole: a process "Towards a Strategy for YOUTH in SEE"

AIMS of the process:

• to valorise the achievements of the existing initiatives,
• to encourage stronger dialogue between main actors in the youth field about the YOUTH programme as a tool for developing youth work, European youth co-operation and youth mobility - as a basis for the further implementation of the Programme in the countries of this region of Europe,
• to support further training of and networking among YOUTH programme multipliers,
• to initiate and develop a more strategic approach for the further implementation of the YOUTH programme in South East Europe,
• to give a clearer sense of purpose to the various local, national and regional actors working for the YOUTH programme in the countries of South East Europe,
• to increase the accessibility of the SALTO-YOUTH South East Europe Resource Centre in the region.

In this framework, the SALTO SEE Resource Centre organised the following activities:

I. Valorisation and strategy building seminar, which brought together the regional partners of the above mentioned projects in May 2004 in Sarajevo. The seminar aimed at valorising the achievements of these projects, as well as developing joint strategies for the future to ensure sustainable results of the investments done so far.

II. National/regional meetings on the YOUTH programme: Teams of partners (NGOs) from the same country organised a "YOUTH information and development meeting" during the autumn of 2004 bringing together between 20 and 60 interested actors in the field of youth from their country, to identify and discuss proposals for further activities aiming to strengthen the implementation of the YOUTH programme in their country. Alltogether, close to 200 youth leaders and other actors in the youth field took part in the process.

III. Regional follow-up meeting, which in November 2004 brought back together representatives from each country of the region that had held a national meering on the YOUTH Programme during the autumn. Here, the outcomes and recommendations for follow-up of the national meetings were shared and collected.

Main recommendations

Major recommendations included the setting up of Contact Points for the YOUTH programme in SEE, the possibility of direct applications the YOUTH programme grants for organisations from SEE, the organisation of more support activities in the region and the translation of relevant information materials into the languages of SEE.

All of these proposals were taken up by the European Commission and SALTO SEE in the following years.

More information, including the full report of the whole process, is available from SALTO SEE upon request.