In 2024-2025, the Youth Partnership is working on a new T-kit on the Well-being and mental health of young people.

Training kits (T-kits) are hands-on materials meant for supporting the training and education of practitioners involved in international youth work. Since 1998, the Youth Partnership has been continuously developing T-kits and in recent years has been updating the content of different T-kits to reflect the continuous development of the youth work field and the changes of general context.

The T-kit will aim at:

  • Offering a comprehensive educational manual to be used by youth workers and trainers in their practical work on the topic with young people;
  • Translating the existing research by the Youth Partnership on this topic as well as the work done by the partner institutions and other youth sector stakeholders for educational purposes;
  • Identifying and sharing relevant good youth work practices and available support systems and resources at European, national and local levels, and examples of existing initiatives of cross-sectoral co-operation;
  • Offering a set educational methods and activities to be used in a variety of youth work and non-formal educational settings that allow users to support young people discover, understand and apply youth work referrals and approaches on mental health and well-being issues, as well as their learning process and competence development on the topic;
  • Providing basic necessary knowledge on interrelated topics, including human rights and specialised support.

The Youth Partnership’s research on young people’s mental health and well-being, aimed at analysing available support systems at different levels, providing guidance for policy and practice and further exploring the different triggers that aggravate young people’s mental health and well-being will also feed in into this new practical publication.

The first online expert meeting about the development of the concept took place on 24 June 2024, and the publication of the T-kit 16 is foreseen for 2026.

Read the draft concept note and find out more!

Cover of the training kitParticipatory youth policy implies that young people are involved in policy making at all stages, from inception to implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The main feature of participatory youth policy is a mobilised effort to promote co-creation of youth policy with young people and to include strengths and talents from the field, making sure that youth policy is built on democratic principles, support for solidarity, inclusion, equality, openness and outreach. Across Europe, meaningful youth participation in dialogue and mutually respectful work in policy implementation are understood to be prerequisites for effective and efficient policy making. Knowledge, understanding and commitment to knowledge based participatory youth policy has increased significantly following the publication by the EU–Council of Europe Youth Partnership of About time! A reference manual for youth policy from a European perspective in 2021.

This T-Kit complements the manual and provides educational support for building youth sector capacity for participatory policy making. The knowledge developed in the sector over the past few decades, on which this T-Kit is based, will benefit youth leaders, workers, trainers and organisations advocating participatory structures, especially at local and national levels. Youth policy makers will be able to launch participatory processes by using
the activities contained in this T-Kit. Organisations and experts developing training and development strategies on youth policy may find the T-Kit to be a useful resource. It is structured to enable users to find a wide range of resources in one place for successful educational processes on participatory youth policy. The T-Kit provides conceptual, methodological and educational frameworks and offers a set of educational activities and a toolbox to help address the themes of participatory youth policy making, enabling its users to learn, grow and importantly – to engage.

 

The launch event of T-kit 15 took place in April 2024 in Faro, Portugal. 

 

Download the T-kit 15 "Participatory youth policy" (14 Mb) >>