Partner Search: KA220-YOU Village Reboot

Here's the full description for your Otlas project page. Plain text, scannable, no markdown — Otlas fields usually strip formatting, so this is written to read well as-is.

THE IDEA

Across Europe, villages are emptying. Young people leave for cities and rarely return, services close behind them, and each departure makes the next more likely. The buildings often remain — an empty school, a silent mill, a festival nobody runs anymore — but the people who would bring them back to life are gone.

Money goes into rural infrastructure. Almost nothing addresses the decision that actually empties a village: a young person's choice to leave and not come back. Nobody asks that young person to design the village they would have stayed in.

Village Reboot does.

HOW IT WORKS

In each partner country, a youth team "adopts" one shrinking village — ideally including young people with a personal connection to it, whether they still live there or left.

AUDIT — The team works with the residents who stayed to map what the village still has: buildings, skills, traditions, and the diaspora that left but didn't forget.
CO-DESIGN — Residents and young people choose ONE intervention together. Not imported from outside; chosen by the people who live there.
PROTOTYPE — During a short in-village residency, the team actually builds it. A co-working corner in the old school. A one-day revival of a dead festival. A remote-work pilot. Something real, small enough to finish.
HAND OVER — Before the residency ends, someone local takes ownership so the intervention outlives the visit.
CAPTURE — Every step is documented and distilled into the Village Reboot Protocol.

WHAT THE PROJECT PRODUCES

A participatory village asset-audit toolkit
A youth-residency methodology
One real, tested intervention in each participating village
The VILLAGE REBOOT PROTOCOL — a step-by-step method any other community can run without us
A cross-border network of participating villages and reconnected youth
Uptake material for local and regional authorities

The protocol is the point. Each village picks what fits its own assets from a menu of options — so what travels between countries is the METHOD, not a fixed blueprint that only works in one place.

We are honest about scale: this project will not reverse rural depopulation. What it will produce is a tested, repeatable method plus proof that small youth-led interventions work.

WHY THIS FITS ERASMUS+
Primary priority: Participation in democratic life, common values and civic engagement — young people co-designing the places they live in, with real decisions and real consequences.

Also: Inclusion and diversity (peripheral rural territories that mainstream programmes overlook, and young people whose fewer-opportunity dimension is geography) and Environment and climate (reuse of existing buildings, low-footprint revival models).

It connects directly to the EU's Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas and Rural Pact, and to Goal #6 "Moving rural youth forward" of the EU Youth Strategy 2019–2027.

ABOUT US
Actina is based in Xanthi, Greece, and works across two fields that rarely meet: regional development and youth work.

Our regeneration and rural track record includes RETINA (revitalising declining areas, Interreg SEE), Re-Block (participatory neighbourhood regeneration, URBACT II) and TYTHIS (local resources and cultural tourism for rural employment). On the youth side we coordinate YOUTH-ful-GUIDES (Erasmus+, young people as local guides and cultural mediators).

We also provided networking and operational support for the Region of East Macedonia & Thrace at its Brussels office, and have prepared over 500 SME business plans. In practice this means we know which mayors will actually engage, and what a viable intervention really costs.

Actina will coordinate.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Three to four partners. Each should bring a candidate village AND an existing working relationship with it.

GRASSROOTS YOUTH NGO with genuine rural reach — any programme country. Role: mobilising and supporting the youth teams, embedding participation methods.
LOCAL DEVELOPMENT OR RURAL-ACTION BODY — ideally northern/western Europe for geographic spread. Role: connecting to municipalities, co-authoring the protocol.
VILLAGE ASSOCIATION OR MUNICIPALITY PARTNER — ideally central/eastern Europe. Role: hosting a residency, securing resident buy-in.

We are looking for a real team with complementary roles, not a list of names on a form.

ONE THING WE ASK OF EVERY PARTNER: bring a village you already have a relationship with. This project depends entirely on a community that genuinely wants the process. We are not approaching villages cold, and a partner who would have to is not the right fit.

PRACTICAL DETAILS

Action: KA220-YOU Cooperation Partnership
Field: Youth
Application deadline: 1 October 2026
Indicative project period: March 2027 – February 2029 (24 months)
Coordinator: Actina, Xanthi, Greece
Consortium: minimum 3 organisations from 3 programme countries; target 4–5

NEXT STEP
Send us a short profile of your organisation, your country, the village you would bring, and which role above fits you best. We will send back the full 2-page concept note.

PLEASE REPLY BY 7 SEPTEMBER 2026. We submit on 1 October, so partners need to be confirmed in early September to co-draft properly. It is a short window — but it means joining a project that is already designed, not one being invented around the application.

Please also have your organisation's OID ready, or start the registration early. All partners must be named at submission.
Contact: [kyriakidis@actina.gr] — Actina (FM-EPICHEIREIN), Xanthi, Greece