<< Objectives >>The project is designed by young people for young people with the main purpose of getting young people more involved in democratic life in their countries and in the EU, to give them a voice to express their concerns and to empower them to be active citizens while understanding and respecting the democratic systems in place in their countries and in the EU.The main objectives of the project are to help young people understand and get involved in:•Policy Reform•The EU democratic system and the involvement of youth in policy reform•Learning and understanding EU laws and policies•Active Citizenship and EU citizenship•Human Rights •Ways to meet with policymakers and to facilitate policy reform with youth needs in mind•Encouraging youth to be more active in democratic life<< Activities >>This project will be a Youth Exchange which will take place in Cyprus. The activities foreseen for the youth exchange will include proven non-formal methodologies and will be run by the young participants of the project and managed by the partner organisations.We will have participants from each of 5 countries, including a leader, who will implement the project. The profile of the participants is young people from the partner countries who come from a broad spectrum of each country, who will represent their country and the youth of their country in this project to learn from other youth, share their ideas, knowledge, voice the opinions and work together to understand and make the changes needed in their countries and the EU.It is hoped that a KA3 project could be a follow-up project where we can take results and outcomes to policymakers and ask for their involvement in the KA3 project. << Impact >>If we can measure the impact of this project from the interest and involvement of youth in the partner countries, then we can predict a great impact on the participants and the youth in the partner countries. It is vital that these young people are given the opportunity to work on this project and realise it so that they can see who they can start an idea and see it through, how their voices can be heard. The process used in this project is democratic, so the learning has already started, we have developed the hope that change is possible, and this project will form the start of turning the hope for a better and more democratic life for young people into a reality.The impact of this project on the participants, the youth involved, the youth in the communities and target groups, will be the creation of a society of young people from all walks of life, active in their communities, active in the democratic process, active in policy reform, active citizens and active EU citizens.The impact will be more young people voting at elections. Young people contributing and working towards policy reform. Young people building their societies and the same young people building the EU of tomorrow.

With the referendum in the UK resulting in the UK on the verge of exiting the EU, we see confusion and distress. What happened and what will happen? How does this affect us? Is there a weakness in the EU? We will examine the meaning of the common market and how this affects all of us. So many countries want access to this common market and even the UK who voted to leave the EU, still wants access to the common market. What is the price of being part of the common market and why is the UK voting to leaving the EU when leaving it would be a disadvantage? We will see the relationship that Norway has with the EU, and how different this is from a normal member of the EU. Is there an advantage to this? Rumour has it that the UK will follow this path, what will the impact of this be on the UK and the EU? We will look at mobility, one the major factors, believed to give the leave vote its majority. We will examine the Mobility Treaty and see if this has disadvantages to member states. We will also examine how Switzerland tried to abandon the freedom of mobility treaty with the EU, which was never realised. All of these factors have to do with democracy and how it works and how it affects us. Is democracy failing?We saw that the results of the UK referendum showed a very small margin of difference in the results, showing how democracy works, but also showing that democracy can leave almost half the voting population dissatisfied with the results. We also saw how youth felt cheated by this referendum because they could not vote for such an important issue. Is this yet another statistic showing how young people have no say in their future?As a result of the UK referendum we also saw, in the media, that some other countries want a EU exit. Is this propaganda or is the EU truly starting to fail? The question boils down to how we measure success and failure. If it was a question of economics only, the EU is a world power economically speaking. If it’s a question of influence on policy, every EU country has a say on EU policy, and even has some liberty to create specific laws for their country, education being one of these. These are only some of the questions we will ask to try to understand why many feel that the EU is not working or failing. Perhaps we will discover some problems that are not in the media, or perhaps the media is sharing different version of reality in different countries.Our objective is to understand the working of the EU, how it works, why it works and what role we as youth play in it and how we can change the future of our EU, so that we are truly living in a Union. As a direct result of this project we have seen how young people have a greater understanding of the EU, and more importantly their role as citizens of the EU. We have seen that scepticism of the EU is brought on by media, by feeding on the fears of people, and exploiting the ignorance of people about what the EU really is. We started this project with many people seeing the EU as a separate entity, rather than something that we have all created and that we are a part of. We left this project feeling more European, feeling the obligation to be more active as citizens, as people and helping the EU grow, to bring countries closer together and to work on a better future for all of us. We saw how the EU invests in youth, and in our countries, helping to make them stronger and better. We saw how EU laws are created to protect us, and to respect our cultures and us as people as citizens of the EU.We learned the important of our human rights, of our votes, and the European democratic model. We learned that the next steps for our countries and the EU are in our hands, and that we as young people need to be the model citizens that will build our futures.

Looking at current events in the EU and especially issues like Scotland becoming independent, the UK considering leaving the EU, the economic crisis in the EU and other factors that influence our daily lives, our training course will look at how these impact youth in the EU. We will see how these important issues impact the EU and its stability and our standing as EU Citizens. An important factor with regard to the UK and the possibility that it might leave the EU will be discussed in details and especially the impact something like this will have on the EU. Looking at these problems allows us to understand the fundamental principles of the EU and how youth are affected by these outcomes and how young people can influence these outcomes or changes in the EU.The objective of the training course is to give youth workers and staff the tools to develop activities and workshops in their communities for young people to better understand the EU, their role in the EU and to become more active citizens. Giving them the tools to help young people plan a more active role in their society and in the EU, to support their beliefs, uphold their principles and their cultures in a unified EU that respects our individuality.Young people believe that they are insignificant in the EU and that they play no role in policy reform or any change. This has become more apparent with the degree of difficulty seen when trying to approach policy makers and stakeholders. The system is almost designed to exclude the input of youth. This training course will give youth workers the tools to develop methodologies to help young people to be more active in the fields of youth policy, to understand how events in the EU affect their lives and how to make the changes that our policies need on a local and European level. The project will teach how we can access information and EU laws and how these laws are created. We will see how youth can be more active in policy reform. The training course will outline the principals of democracy and evaluate the democratic standing of EU countries and the EU as a union. Elaborating on the impact smaller countries can have on EU policy and the impact and changes that the EU implements in smaller EU member countries and the effect of this on youth.In order to achieve these goals the activities foreseen for the project are vital, non-formal and informal methodologies are used to achieve these goals. Discussions are used to allow participants to share knowledge, ideas and experiences with each other. Discussions will give the participants more confidence, especially when seeing that participants from other countries are facing the same problems. Open debates will allow participants to express their personal viewpoints of different matters and to justify them through discussions. This will also allow for others to gain knowledge based on the experiences of others.Workshops will be designed to maintain a European dimension as all groups will be made up of at least one person from each country allowing for inter-cultural learning during the workshops. Workshops are designed around the various subjects allowing the different participants to discuss the issues and work together to solve problems and share experiences.Role playing will also be used to allow the participants to get another perspective of different problems. This has proven to be very successful as it allows for the youth to see common problems from the viewer’s point of view rather than the actor. This also allows for innovative ways of showing problems. This also allows people to take on the role of other people allowing them to better understand problems from different perspectives.Simulations are also done during the project, allowing people to take on roles which are often opposite to their real roles. During the simulations the participants will take on roles to re-enact a real situation based or events and problems in the real world. The participants will work together in their different roles to solve problems and to find solutions to these problems. Important here is that the participants take on random roles which add additional learning tools as they need to think and act as the person they are simulating. Using all the above tools and methodologies the participants learn through non-formal and informal activities which are real, but are within a safe environment allowing them to learn from each other, make mistakes which can be corrected through discussions and not put themselves at risk. In real life when making these choices the results could be dangerous but these activities simulate reality and allow for learning in a safe and secure environment.As a result we will give the participants the tools to be able to help more young people understand the principles of the EU, democracy and the role of young people in policy reform and the idea of active citizenship.They will also be able to identify

<< Objectives >>The objective of the project was to create awareness about the environment and to get youth more involved in greener choices. We also had as an objective to look at different employment opportunities in green jobs to help overcome the high youth unemployment in the EU and to increase the employability of youth.<< Implementation >>This project project was a youth exchange made up of 56 youth and their leaders from 11 different countries.<< Results >>We learned about the labour market and how we could create employment opportunities with environmental and green jobs. We learned about working together to preserve our resources and to protect our planet, to make changes in our homes, town, cities, countries and the EU for a greener better future for all of us. We also learned about EU environmental policies and objectives.

As a result of a previous Youth Exchange the participants identified a series of problem they are experiencing as youth. They identified that as youth they don’t have much say in what is happening in policy and especially those from small countries who feel that as a country they have no say in the policies of the EU. Not only do young people of these countries feel powerless when it comes to how their lives are affected by different policies but the crisis in the EU has affected their employment options and again they feel there is no solution for the problems, at least not from their hands. The project identified specific problems related to youth in the partner countries and looked at methods to overcome these problems in a uniform way that can be used across the EU. We looked at different solutions for problems like youth unemployment, education and methods to enhance skills and help young people become more employable and at the same time allow young people to be more active in their community and in the EU. We explored the true meaning of a unified EU and how important it is for each member and each citizen to work together for a stronger more unified EU.Each partner in the project identified problems specific to their country and also worked on solutions in helping young people and also in finding methods to bring the EU closer together to work together to be more unified to build a stronger more unified EU. We have also included Turkey in the project to give us an added element to the project as a candidate country to the EU allowing us to see the perspectives of young people outside of the EU and perhaps learning from their methods and also promoting the EU model to them. Once all the information was collected the groups of young people got together for the project activity to discuss all the issues in detail and work on solutions for these problems allowing for sharing of knowledge and cultural exchanges.There is a global crisis going on and the EU is equally affected by this crisis. Sadly, though many young people from different countries are feeling the effects of the crisis and many are beginning to lose hope in the EU system because they feel that they are excluded from the EU support system. Young people are unable to find employment, and mobility options are growing less and less and young people are losing hope in a unified Europe. This project gave hope to the young participants and more so to those who have learned from the outcomes of the project and have learned about amazing EU tools available to youth and also how the EU should work and how important their roles are in the EU.Our project looked at the crisis and the problems that young people are experiencing, we looked at the various tools the EU offers youth to overcome these difficult times. We asked the question of how the common currency benefitted us or has it caused problems? Is it really the right choice for all of us? How can we work together as youth of EU countries to make our EU work for us and help us achieve our goals?