"GENERATION Z. BE READY." 

The goal of the project is to increase the capacity of youth organizations from September 2018 to 2020 and the quality of non-formal education in work with young people and to provide support to youth workers in Latvia and Lithuania by exchanging experience and effective methods of non-formal education and to develop a ”toolkit" for 60 activities in 90 minutes in Latvian, Lithuanian and Russian for 14-16 year olds.

The set of tools will consist of board games, various types of video materials, presentations, role-playing games, handicrafts and other methods of NFE education that will help to work with young people to the maximum quality, consuming on preparation a minimum amount of time.

Project name "GENERATION Z. be READY." reflects its idea to help youth workers to be maximally prepared for work with young people of the modern generation. We want to offer youth workers maximum ready-to-use tools instead of writing long methodological guidelines.

Developed activities will focus on the development of multilateral young people, which will lead to their social inclusion and reduce the risk of exclusion. We want to develop engaging and attractive methods of working with young people, as this will help to more successfully involve young people from the risk group in NFI activities.

Statistics show that only 4.4% of young people aged 15-29 in Latvia and 6.5% in Lithuania engage in non–formal educational activities, which is below the average EU creator at 11.4%. One of the main reasons for the low involvement of young people is the insufficient quality of non-formal education and the lack of capacity of the implementers.

Key factors in stopping effective youth work:

Lack of youth workers,

Lack of links between youth workers/organizations and young people – only 6% of young people mention youth workers as the information channels that young people use daily for information mining on various opportunities in education, leisure, employment and other youth-related activities matters,

Lack of NFE methods for youth workers.

The inadequate quality of the NFE and the lack of capacity of its implementers lead to the following problems:

Low levels of Youth Initiative and engagement: only 60% of young people participate in interest groups and only 33% are involved in youth organisations,

Lack of competence in young people,

The high risk of poverty and social exclusion among young people - 39% in Latvia and 31% in Lithuania - these are one of the highest rates in the EU, with an average of 28%. 

Plans within the project: 

1. explore how young people perceive information more efficiently and what topics they are more interested in. 

2. taking into account the results, prepare a "toolkit" for attractive activities so that young people acquire the necessary skills through topics of interest to them and more effective methods.

3. the results and tools of the study are summarised to be shared with other youth organizations in Latvia, Lithuania and Russian speaking countries in the EU.

Participants of the project are volunteers and employees of all three organizations - Pathseekers, Association KĒFA and Kartu Sweet.

We plan that as a result of project implementation:

1.Youth initiatives and engagement levels will increase

2.Youth competencies will increase

3.The risk of poverty and social exclusion will decrease