SMART-Y

Youth from rural areas together for green and sustainable European smart villages  

Youth in rural areas appear generally uninterested in politics, undermining cohesion and sustainable development of the future European society. COVID-19 crisis exacerbated this situation, affecting also youth civic engagement.

SMART-Y’s purpose is the creation of a network of like-minded youth organisations from across Europe, active at grassroots level and able to engage, connect and empower youth to achieve a society in which all young people, namely those from rural areas, are environmentally active, educated and able to make a difference in their everyday lives.

Results:

• Train the trainers toolkit to prepare organisations for working with young people in a transnational perspective, training and networking with other youth workers and youth organizations, sharing experience and good practice, and fostering peer-learning among them, including via large scale mobilities;
• Fostered youth participation to the local policy programming in the green and sustainability sector through local living labs aimed at gathering their specific priorities;
• European virtual hackathons and large-scale cross-border mobilities aimed at putting youth from rural and disadvantaged territories in the best condition for co-creating concrete civic action projects, responding to the “smart villages” topic;
• Idea development and prototyping workshops likely to make the ideas more concrete before “investing” in it;
• National policy roundtables entitled “Sustainable policy labs”, aimed at encouraging policy actors at local level, from EU rural areas, to concretely integrate the innovative ideas co-developed with/by young people within local programming in the green and sustainability sectors, as well as to adopt this participatory and collaborative approach in the future programming.

For more info: opportunities@ciape.it