Introduction - a Challenging Vision

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The launch of the Youth in Action programme ushered in a period of change for National Agencies and their work on inclusion. New roles and new demands have created a need for a more strategic approach.

But what is "strategy"? What is involved in developing a strategy specifically on inclusion? How do you know if your NA actually needs an inclusion strategy? These and other questions are addressed in this booklet.

Shaping Inclusion de-mystifies strategy and encourages NAs to take a more strategic approach to inclusion. The booklet presents a step-by-step approach which NAs can use to develop their own national-level inclusion strategies. In this way NAs can maximise the results and impact of their inclusion work.

Shaping Inclusion aims to make strategy development more attractive and accessible. The approach and methods described here are not only relevant to the field of inclusion but can be used by anyone in almost any context.

A challenging vision

Rather than duplicate already-existing strategy documents, "Shaping Inclusion" aims to simplify the theory behind strategy development in order to make it more accessible to a wider audience.

At the same time, the booklet presents examples of how NAs have put strategic theory into practice specifically in the field of inclusion. Many of these examples were provided by NAs during the SALTO Inclusion Round Table Meeting on Inclusion Strategy (March 2007 - Belgium).

In this way, SALTO Inclusion hopes to help de-mystify the general concept of strategy and at the same time to motivate Inclusion Officers to take steps to develop their own inclusion strategies.

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Just another strategy book?

This booklet aims to address the unique situation of National Agencies and to demonstrate how the theoretical concepts of strategy development can be practically applied to their inclusion work within the Youth in Action programme.

The word "strategy" suffers from a case of extremely bad publicity. For many of us, the idea of having to make a strategy conjures up images of endless discussions which seem to go nowhere and hours wasted in meetings which produce few or no concrete results.

If you have ever been involved in strategy-making, these images are probably familiar to you but it doesn't have to be this way.

• Developing a strategy can be a very motivating process (yes, really!)
• It can provide you or your organisation with solid facts which you can then use to chart the future direction of your work.
• Having a clear strategy can help shake an organisation out of its tired daily routine and provide it with a new set of objectives to strive for.
• A strategy can give your co-workers the feeling that they are doing more than just "going through the motions" and instead make them part of a motivated team working towards concrete goals.

Strategy-making used to be the territory of big business and commercial enterprises. However, the ongoing formalisation of the non-formal youth sector has resulted in the need for a new approach to our work (as an Inclusion Officer in a National Agency).

This is especially true for the National Agencies (NAs), and more in specific for Inclusion Officers, of the Youth in Action programme. The changeover from the former YOUTH programme to the current Youth in Action programme has transformed both the profile and the tasks of the NAs.
To be able to meet the requirements of the new programme, the Inclusion Officer will have to re-define their working methods and their relationships with key stakeholders.

Nowhere in the new programme is the need for strategy greater than in relation to the inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities. Despite the positive legacy of the YOUTH programme, many challenges still surround the topic of inclusion which Youth in Action must now try to address.

Walk into any bookstore and you will likely find shelves full of books on strategic thinking and strategy development. So why write one more?

For a long time strategy-making has been associated with profit-making activities. Many of the strategy books available on the market today are aimed at commercial companies. They give great advice on how to increase your profit margin, how to do market research and how to sell a product to new customers. While the basic concepts of strategy-making described in those books can be applied to many contexts, it is not always easy to see how to adapt a profit-making approach to the non-profit sector.

The good news is that the need for strategic thinking is becoming more accepted in the non-formal youth sector. More and more strategy books and documents are being developed specifically for youth organisations. These are a very good place to start but there will always be a need to take written concepts and translate them into the reality on the ground.

To date there have been few attempts to focus on the reality of National Agencies or to understand the specificities of strategy-making in their context. NAs are different from many other non-profit institutions. The profile of an NA Inclusion Officer is multi-faceted (programme implementer, financial manager, advisor and disseminator) and the work they are asked to do is sometimes complex (for instance inclusion work with its different profiles of young people and wide range of needs). These and other factors all need to be brought into balance if NAs Inclusion Officers are to do their work effectively. One way to find this balance is to encourage more strategic thinking within NAs but just promoting the concept of strategy is not enough. Inclusion Officers need advice and strategic tools which take their specialised role into account.

Who is this booklet for?

"Shaping inclusion?" is for Inclusion Officers who want to know what is involved in strategy-making and strategy implementation. This booklet is aimed primarily at "newcomers" to strategy. It will examine the basic concepts behind strategy development and present them in a user-friendly way. By doing so, we hope to erase some of the negative stereotypes surrounding the concept of strategy, to make the idea of strategic thinking more attractive and accessible and to demonstrate how strategies can be developed in any context.
If you are already a strategy "veteran", many of the concepts in this booklet will probably be familiar to you. Nevertheless, we encourage you to read through the following pages. If anything is certain in the world of strategy development, it is the fact that there is always something new to learn.

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Youth in Action - New programme, new challenges

The Youth in Action (YIA) programme was launched on January 1, 2007. At first glance, it may appear as though YIA is merely a continuation (or an expansion) of the previous YOUTH programme. But look a little closer and it quickly becomes apparent that YIA is more than just a replica of the YOUTH programme. YIA is an exciting but challenging new step forward in European-mobility activities which will place new demands on all of the partners involved.

Compared to the YOUTH programme, Youth in Action is broader and more ambitious in its scope. Youth in Action offers a wider range of activities which may be carried out in a much larger geographic area. In addition, the programme aims to increase the overall number of participants in all Actions by increasing the total number of activities per year. These are all positive developments but from the very beginning of YIA there were many questions surrounding the implementation of this highly complex programme.

One of these questions concerns finances. While YIA proposes to expand the number of activities, the financial resources available are not necessarily in line with the expansion of the programme. An imbalance between high goals and insufficient resources could pose a serious challenge in the coming years. The imbalance between high goals and low resources will pose a serious challenge in the coming years.

Another change within YIA is the re-definition of the position of National Agencies. In the YOUTH programme, NAs were accountable directly to the European Commission. Now, in YIA, National Agencies are also (equally) accountable to the National Authorities in their own countries. This means that the Agencies will have to find a way to balance the expectations and obligations on European level with those on national level.

This new accountability is not just theoretical. In the new YIA programme, the European Commission intends to take a more active role in monitoring and following-up developments within the national work plans. This will likely mean that NAs will need to invest much more time in their planning and evaluations.

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Changes to inclusion

Many promoters who work directly with these youngsters felt that while the YOUTH programme successfully included XXX in kleur XXX the young people in its activities (i.e. provided access), those same activities often failed to respond to real needs. Promoters felt that the programme could also make a powerful contribution to the social inclusion XXX in kleur XXX of these young people.

At the launch of YIA, the inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities was named a permanent priority for the seven-year period of the programme. This in itself is no change from the YOUTH programme. However, the European Commission (EC) has produced a new "Inclusion Strategy" to be implemented in the framework of Youth in Action which responds to the wish to make the programme not just inclusive but also to make it a tool of inclusion.

Take a look at the Inclusion Strategy of the European Commission at www.salto-youth.net/InclusionStrategy/

This new Inclusion Strategy will have far-reaching implications for the inclusion work of National Agencies. Some of the most notable changes in the EC's Inclusion Strategy include:

• The introduction of the aim to stimulate the use of Youth in Action as a tool to enhance social inclusion, active citizenship and employability of young people with fewer opportunities and to contribute to social cohesion at large
• The introduction of the concept of "A Inclusion" and "B Inclusion" projects (highlighting the difference between projects which actively include young people with fewer opportunities vs. projects that have a thematic focus on inclusion and stressing that both are given equal importance)
• A new emphasis on the need for dissemination and exploitation of the results of inclusion-themed projects.

 

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What will these changes mean?

First of all, it will no longer be enough for NAs to demonstrate that they have been inclusive (i.e. that they have ensured equal access for all young people to YIA activities). Now they must also show how their activities make a direct contribution to social inclusion.

In addition, NAs will have to publicize and promote the positive outcomes of inclusion-themed projects. To do this, the NA (and more in specific the Inclusion Officer together with colleagues) will need to have a better overview and understanding of the concrete results coming out of individual projects. This means that the Inclusion Officer must manage the quantity of their inclusion projects/participants as well as the quality within those projects. To do this, they will need to define quality standards and quality measurements.

Taken together, these are all substantial changes which will impact NAs on many levels. Clearly there is a compelling need for NAs to take a more strategic approach to all aspects of their work and in particular to inclusion, not just to satisfy the demands of the European Commission, but in order to better meet the needs of the programme users.