SEMINAR ON YOUTH WORK AND YOUTH POLICY

The seminar on Youth Work and Youth Policy was held at December 8-10, 2000 in Mözen, Germany.

The Baltic Sea Secretariat for Youth Affairs at the Regional Youth Council of Schleswig-Holstein invited people from regional and local authorities in Baltic Sea Region working with youth issues. Each region/municipality was asked to send one person working with projects and exchanges and one responsible for youth policy.

Together they wanted to give actors in regional youth policy a forum to discuss and exchange experience and find common interests for future co-operation; to contribute to the Baltic Sea political structures like BSSSC and UBC and to help to create, support and get information on youth mobility and youth projects.

In the workshop on youth policy the participants made numerous inputs of interest and concern for further consideration. The topics most often mentioned were summarized under the following categories: Information, Parti-cipation, Training and Education, Marginalized Youth, Youth Exchange and Financing, Networks and Organisations. Three smaller working groups were formed which discussed in more detail the questions of 1) Youth Exchange and Financing 2) Networking, Organisations and Information and 3) Participation.

In the final plenary the participants agreed on the following steps:

1. A network of youth workers in the subregions of the Baltic Sea Region will be established. On top of that every country will nominate a national representative. These persons will provide their colleagues within the country with the information they get from the international level. BSSSC will coordinate this network with the support of the Baltic Sea Secretariat for Youth Affairs.
2. The same will happen on local level. We agreed that there are different challenges existing on the local level. UBC might support the establishment of a network of the national representatives. But both networks of national representatives will co-operate.
3. The next BSSSC Conference (25.-27.10.2001 in Riga) will offer a workshop on youth co-operation. The idea is that the network of national representatives will prepare this workshop to secure that the content is hitting the needs of the regions.
4. The next UBC Conference (12.-14.10.2001) will focus on Social Affairs and include a workshop on youth issues.
5. Ideas and topics for next meetings:
   • participation methods
   • social politics (like crime prevention)
   • Baltic Youth Survey (Kari Paakkunainen)

The members of the working group concluded that much more time must be spent on discussing youth policy on the local and regional levels. They suggest that this topic be the subject of a workshop at the next BSSSC-Conference in October 2001 in Riga.