Youth work and challenge of shrinking

The presentation of the project "Strengthening the role of youth-work in contesting dynamics of shrinking cities" took place In the frame of the all-day forum "Working with young people in local communities", on Monday, September 30th in the hall of the Academia Hotel in Zagreb.

The project is implemented by Documenta and seven partner organisations from Croatia, Germany, Portugal and Spain. The aim of the project is to explore and present examples of good practice in working with young people in the shrinking cities. The shrinking cities are settlements with at least 10,000 inhabitants, which have been facing population decline for at least three years and which, as a result, are undergoing socio-structural transformations such as demographic change, deindustrialization and the like. A particular problem is the emigration of young people who do not see the prospect of their own stay in cities and regions that are interspersed.

The core idea of the project is that improving work with young people can affect their perception of the quality of life in their own environment, and thus the decision to stay or later to return to the environment in which they grow up. Therefore, the aim of the project is to affirm and popularize good practices of youth-work and to encourage various social actors to take action with the aim of strengthening the role of working with young people in counteracting the dynamics of shrinking cities. In the first phase of project implementation, field research was conducted in selected cities affected by depopulation processes in the four countries. The results of the research and examples of good practice will be analyzed and described in a manual that will be presented to the public during the final conference in Zagreb in April 2020.

The project "Strengthening the role of youth work in contesting dynamics of shrinking cities" is implemented with the financial support of the European Union through the Erasmus + program