Rediscovering cultures - promoting local heritage for rural community development

Young people living in disadvantaged rural areas are facing many difficult challenges in their everyday life. They are often suffering from having limited access to educational opportunities, which in turn diminishes their chances on the labor market. Low level of community involvement among young people from rural areas is commonly seen as a direct result of the above mentioned obstacles. However, we believe that the community involvement should actually be perceived as the solution to the above mentioned problems. By committing to work for the benefit of their surrounding, young people become more active, gain valuable knowledge and develop many essential social skills that can serve as a great advantage in both their professional and personal life. The proposed project seeks to find new ways of increasing youth participation in rural areas by encouraging young people to rediscover the unique cultural heritage of their small communities. There is a great, underestimated potential in local traditions, customs, cuisine, arts and crafts. Unfortunately, often both youngsters and youth workers, perceive them as old-fashioned or uninteresting and therefore have no willing to explore them. Our project aims at bringing together youth workers and young leaders working in rural communities. This seminar will serve as a space for creating new tools and methods for making local cultures more interesting for young people and thus encouraging them to use their heritage as an opportunity to get more involved in the life of their neighborhood. Revitalizing forgotten traditions and customs can create new possibilities for the distant rural areas to develop in many ways. Through active participation in the process of rediscovering cultures young people gain the opportunity to learn how to use the potential of their local communities, for example by setting up social enterprises in the field of cultural tourism, traditional cuisine, handicraft and others.