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Modern Youth NGO Management- The Challenge of Professionalism
Start date: Sep 1, 2015, End date: Aug 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Youth work is a progressive field that provide space and opportunities for young people to shape their own future and has veryimportant role of encouraging young people to take responsibility for others and get engaged and involved in shaping societybeyond more individual interests. Youth sector employs many people working as full time, part-time, periodical/seasonal workers oron voluntary basis. In Europe, we only find a few countries with well-established youth work policies and structures governed bypublic authorities with paid youth workers, developed vocational training, and higher education curricula for youth workers. Youth Work in Europe started to develop intensively in last decades mainly through civil society organisation. Up to now, civil society organisations kept its position as the main providers of Youth Work. With the increasing number and scope of Youth Work projects, the need for professionalism, standardisation, and quality assurance work within the CSOs became a need. This created a demand for professional youth workers and related studies at the Universities. Considering the most recent report of the European Commission about the Youth Work it confirms the gap on the formalrecognition of the Youth Worker as a salaried or volunteer basis, there’s no existing census even of youth workers across Europe. Thisreport shows us that is not even comparable in terms of numbers due to various definitions of the youth workers. For example asalaried worker involved in the youth work sector are at least 1 230 000 across the EU and on the other hand the number ofvolunteers is even more difficult to estimate given the lack of official figures gathered at the national level however out of 9 EUcountries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland and the UK) there’s an estimated of 1 370 000volunteer youth workers (Report of the EC on “Working with young people: the value of youth work in the European Union”. P. 113,201).Is in the name of this context that the Project will produce special products and initiatives to support the establishing a youth work studies that combine best practices of the theoretical studies about youth sector and similar subjects on one hand and grass-root and policy work undertaken by the CSOs as a complementary "supplement". As a result we will have a completely evidence based developed curricula and clear plan how to implement it from 2016 in the University of Istanbul as part of Pilot Project. We expect to have a pilot with at least 10 students for the year 2016-17 where the fisrt semester will be dedicated to theoretical knowledge and second semester for the practical work in CSOs. Advocating for greater recognition of youth worker as a profession on European level in order to increase quality in youth work, mobility of youth workers and achievements of the sector in generally is idea behind this project and innovative elements are related to the involvement of Universities who are usually not familiar with youth sector and its practices. The cross-sectoral evidence in this project will also bring other expertise, experiences and dimensions that we believe will bringsteps further on the recognition of youth worker as profession creating - consequently - impact on the labor market. The target groups of this project will be Youth Workers, Policy Makers and Youth organizations and Universities all of them benefiting from innovative practices the project will bring.
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