CoMedY - Community Mediation for Youth. Community Mediation for Youth. Theory-based and practical tools for professionals

Aims of the tool

These pages are the result of a two-year journey (even though it started quite before!) based on both theory and practice. We tried to combine the Community Mediation approach with the international youth mobility and volunteering based on non-formal educational methods.

Description of the tool

In the first section, edited by Associazione P.E.CO. – Progetti Europei di Cooperazione, we briefly re-ported on how the CoMedY - Community Mediation for Youth project was drafted and developed. This tool is part of the results stemmed from the project itself.

The second section, jointly written by the partner organizations’ coordinators and volunteers, collects the descriptions and analyses of the six local projects on Community Mediation and youth work which took place based in the countries which were our partners in the project.

In the third part, edited by AssMedCom - Associazione di Mediazione Comunitaria, we present the ap-proach, the methodology and the main techniques used in Community Mediation.

We asked ourselves: is there any suitable name to describe these pages? Were they a manual (given the theoretical part), a toolkit (given the presence of operational tools and practical examples drawn from the application of the approach), or a report (given the description of the general and local pro-jects)?
“Theory-based and practical tools” seemed to us to be the most comprehensive solution.

Not only the contents, but also the target users of these pages belong to different cultural and/or working (or other) contexts. We tried to create a tool that could be used by different users, in particu-lar by:

People working with youth who would like to know the Community Mediation approach to favour ac-tive participation in young adults;
People with experience in the field of youth active participation who would like to try out some Community Mediation techniques;
People already having a baseline knowledge on the Community Mediation approach, but who never applied it when working with youth.

We hope these pages will offer useful hints and inspire your work with and for youth.