Youth work against Violent Radicalisation: competencies developement training

There are more than 1.2 billion young people (ages 15-24) in the world today with about 89 million youth (ages 15-29) in the countries of the European Union. Young people are impacted by constant changes in global social and economic realities, and many of them face poverty, exclusion, inequality and marginalisation. Their personal circumstances and wider political, social and economic environment in which they live may make them vulnerable to various radical influences and also violent radicalisation. Realities of this emerging trend make it necessary to emphasise the need to work with young people in Europe and its neighbouring regions, in order to strengthen their resilience to violent radicalisation, and reinforce the openness and inclusiveness of communities in which they live.

In order to determine and illustrate the role of youth work in this regard, the SALTO EuroMed, SALTO EECA and SALTO SEE Resource Centres together with the National Agencies of Erasmus+ Youth in Action of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom as well as the EU-CoE youth partnership have come together to research and showcase positive ways and initiatives in which youth violent radicalisation can be addressed and prevented and to examine how we can strengthen the role of different actors, in an attempt to compile a long-term strategy about youth work against violent radicalisation.

The training will last 5 days and will be held in a symbolic place in Italy that will help to reflect about the meaning of radicalisation but also opening and community resilience.

The training will provide participant time, tools and input about the importance of growing community resilience that support the youth welbeing specially in critical social and political situation.

The role of youth work in this sense, is to activate process of community resilience that will facilitate the empowerment of youth toward situation of violent radicalisation.
Violence and violent radicalisation are phenomena to which youth are exposed and youth workers should develop specific competencies (or reinforce some) to develop a stronger counternarrative that will allow a stronger community resilience embracing them.

The training will, then, provide opportunities of sharing tools, reflecting about needed competencies and develop some of them and, specially, to valorise the experience already done on the field for reinforce the competencies. In fact, the 5 working days will provide reflection time, coaching tools and dialogue among peers to grow as professionals and reinforce when needed .

The training is open to all the youth workers and practitioners interested in reinforce their personal and professional competencies in working in building community resilience.