11/08/2020
WHAT IS THE COURSE ABOUT?
AThe 'Countryside for new youth generation' project is based on an initiative of young people from urban areas who see their future outside the urban area. Rural areas are often considered to offer fewer opportunities, especially for young people and their active lives. The project is also a kind of overview of how demographics change over time, with the once rural families moving into cities for work. Now, with the congestion of cities and the diminishing opportunities to provide for their livelihoods, young people see that the countryside can offer better opportunity at the quality of life. Despite their enthusiasm for moving away from the hustle of the city, young initiators of this project still see the rural environment having an underdeveloped supply of its potentials. In times of less industrial burden, they want to explore other
options for innovative rural development and at the same time opportunities for remaining in rural areas.
The project aims to fully address these challenges, to enable learning mobility for young people, which will offer them the opportunity to explore and identify natural and cultural assets, on the basis of which they would shape their participation in the development of rural offerings. Young people will thus gain competences in how to engage in intercultural dialogue and actively participate in changes to local policies that support rural development, to make them more open to young people's initiatives and subsequently more involved in rural development.
Youth exchanges will be carried out in Ravne na Koroškem, mostly in our youth hotel Punkl, as well as in the surrounding area, so that the youth can fully feel what the local natural and cultural potentials of outside an urban area mean. We want to enable young people to debate, socialize and exchange experiences, ideas and initiatives, and thus realize the set goals of the project.
These are:
- to open and critically evaluate the problem of rural youth from urban centres,
- identify the natural and cultural potential of the local environment and how to redirect it to attractive potential in order to raise the profile of the countryside,
- overcoming stereotypes about the future of young people from urban centres in rural areas,
- encourage young people to interactively and mutually develop ideas for focusing their own future in rural areas,
- encourage the creativity of young people to use their hobbies as a basis for streaming local potential to raise awareness and develop rural areas,
- strengthen gender mainstreaming in rural development and interconnectivity among young people, in the context of broadest possible cooperation,
- encouraging the involvement of rural and urban areas for the development of a sustainable active tourism product and, consequently, greater supply of the local environment,
- through non-formal education, demonstration of good practices, further inspire young people to change urban to rural life.
Dates: 18.3-27.3.2022
Arrival date: 18.3.2022
Departure date: 28.3.2022
Venue: Ravne na Koroškem, Slovenia
Partners: Slovenia, Slovakia, Serbia, Italy and Croatia
