Wednesday, 17 October 2012 

The Importance of Investing in Youth & continuity of our work

I believe that securing funding for education, training and youth at all levels is one of the main areas the European Youth Forum needs to focus (or better yet maintain its focus) on in the immediate future, something that has to do with continuity of the things we have been working on heavily in the past year. Especially through the next EU Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF) where youth needs to be a cross-sectorial priority, and ensure the role of youth organisations is recognised both politically and financially.

For the past few days here in Brussels I've been attending meetings and working together with our Secretariat and Member Organisations on explaining the need to invest in young people, promoting the value and work of youth organisations, advocating and briefing stakeholders on the current state of affairs with regards to the future EU youth programme and engaging with Commissioner Vassiliou in an interactive live Euranet radio debate while launching our LoveYouthFuture campaign.

I'm convinced that our long-term strategy combining the specific sectorial approach (focus on the future generation of EU youth programmes) and the broad cross-sectorial approach (mainstreaming youth as a political and financial priority in the next MFF was the right one. 

Within the sectorial approach we were indeed faced with many challenges and didn't get the desired continuation of an independent separate YiA2.0 programme. However, we can be proud of the work we did and learned many valuable lessons along the way. We achieved some important milestones both within the Council as well as the European Parliament: a separate youth chapter and support for European youth NGOs and EU-wide networks. Now we need to continue keeping up the moment and make sure this approximation of the Council and the EP more towards our initial proposal of “youth moves”, “youth decides” and “youth works” than the Commission's original Erasmus for all proposal will be further strengthened and supported by a specific budget line for youth.

Our cross-sectorial approach and advocacy for a youth-friendly MFF has been focused on the European Council, the relevant MEPs working on the MFF report and today's launching of our online platform that will offer young people, volunteers, activists and interested public a chance to express their own views on why investing in youth is important and how this should happen. At the same time the platform offers a list of our own clear demands, especially the need for a strong focus on youth in the next EU budget. We need to ensure young people of today will have the right to be young again and focus on having dreams and hope for the future, contribute actively to society, be engaged and be able to lead autonomous lives similar to what their parents' generation was able to do. Instead young people today are in danger of becoming a so-called lost generation and chocked by ongoing austerity measures that clearly don't work. We have policy suggestions that go in the right direction: a youth guarantee scheme, a charter for the rights of interns and volunteers and recognition of youth organisations as providers of non-formal education helping reach out to more young people get better skills that make them better equipped for the challenges they are facing in becoming autonomous citizens.

As Youth Forum we should cater for the needs of our youth organisations and the young people they represent and make the case in favour of the youth sector as a relevant part of society that contributes to it and is part of the solution, not part of the problem. That is why young people and youth organisations need to be recognised, respected and supported fully and integrated in decision-making and policy-making processes in areas that affect them. And I am convinced that the best way for the Youth Forum to do this is to build on the excellent work done and the experiences and contacts gathered by maintaining continuity in this crucial area of our work so that we can jointly reach our goal of more investment in youth and youth-friendly programme for all young Europeans!