Darek: Welcome to under 30 the podcast series by the youth partnership that brings the research results, explores trends in young people's lives and themes relevant for youth policy and practice.
The EU -Council of : youth partnership has recently published a study: Young people in rural areas, diverse, ignored, and unfulfilled co -authored by Adina Marina Șerban and Rūta Brazienė.
One of the most striking findings is that rural policies ignore young people and youth policies ignore rural youth.
Generally, there is little understanding and acceptance in policy that young people in the rural areas represent a diversity of groups, interests, needs, and aspirations.
My name is Dariusz Grzemny, and together with Tanya Basarab from the EU - Council of Europe youth partnership, we are discussing the challenges rural youth face and the youth work and youth policy responses with Adina Marina Șerban - one of the authors of the publication, and also with Karen Ayvazyan from the Advisory Council on Youth, in the Council of Europe.
Enjoy listening!
Welcome everybody to this episode.
We have three people today, Tanya, Adina and Karen, which were introduced before.
The first question is to Tanya.
Tanya, there is this research paper published by the partnership on young people in the rural areas.
And the title is Young people in the rural areas: diverse, ignored, and unfulfilled.
Why this paper published by the partnership now?
Tanya: So we are in a very particular time slowly and trying to understand, relaunch many things.
We are hearing a lot of policy initiatives, many of them targeting young people.
And we also know that in the youth sector there, this focus on discussing on taking rural youth forward, which is one of the EU youth goals.
And in the Council of Europe, there is quite a lot of discussions about the situation and the opportunities young people in rural areas get and how especially the offer of youth policy, so, participation, civic, engagement youth work, and any type of non-formal learning activities are offered to them.
So to support these initiatives, we have asked Adina and another researcher from our pool Rūta Brazienė to look at the needs of young people, their aspirations, and how they are actually now reflected in policies already, in policies, in programs and initiatives.
And we've done that by collecting a little bit of information from the European Knowledge Center for Your Policy correspondence from the researchers.
And Adina and Rūta tried to put it together.
So, I think that the title says already a lot and hopefully it will call for reading it and looking into the findings.
Darek: Adina you are one of the author of this research paper.
I know that there is a lot of conclusions and recommendations coming from this paper, but maybe let's start a little bit with highlighting what are the specific challenges that young people in the rural areas face in Europe?
If you can say a few words about it and then we can see what the actually already existing responses to these challenges cause you highlight some of them in the paper both in the youth work area, but also in, in policy and policy development and implementation.
Adina: Thank you Darek.
Yeah, the challenges first and a lot of questions because it's a research paper, so we also have findings, but I think that there's a lot of questions that need still an answer from the magic triangle's, from policy, research, in also from practice.
When we started somehow with the challenge, when we started documenting the paper, because looking at all the statistics and all the numbers that were there, we understood that it's impossible to say how many young people would live in the rural areas in Europe, because
there's still the question of how many would still have their official residence in the rural communities, but in the end who's living in the nearest city or you know, we also speak of a massive migration phenomenon when it comes to a lot of rural communities in Europe.
So that would be, let's say one of the main findings that instill a question to answer how many young people would live in the rural communities in Europe.
And from this question, of course, we move to the needs and challenges, trying to understand what would be the barriers that young people living in the rural areas would face because yeah, we in different research projects as well as in different
programmes, European programmes, we speak of young people with fewer opportunities, but not all young people living in the rural areas are young people with fewer opportunities.
So we, we try to understand what the vulnerabilities would be, and for that we try to look at the barriers to employment, to health services, to education, especially now in this very strange times when school moved online, but in the end, we don't know how many students would have access to, to follow the online education process.
So, somehow, as a conclusion of this approach and perspective would be that there are several barriers, but research didn't really look at them separated.
So a lot of vulnerabilities put all together and what we know is that young people living in the rural communities would face barriers in accessing the basic services.
Of course, everything getting much more complicated with the pandemic.
So yeah, with this unresponded, we also moved to understanding what was there and what has been done for young people living in the rural communities.
And it was also somehow sad to understand that even the policies and measures that were there were in place were mainly to support young farmers.
So a lot of on agriculture, which of course it's good, it's essential for the rural communities, but we would also like to understand what's its diversity there because there's a lot of important subjects for young people that were not covered.
So nothing about gender, nothing about identity, diversity, very few on social inclusion and on the needs and interests of young people living in the rural community.
So, speaking of what's there, there is something on agriculture and supporting young farmers, but not on the other interests and aspirations of young people living in the rural communities.
And that would also go for the European programmes.
So, how to support young people to access the basic services or to set up their own initiative, which is not linked to agriculture.
It's basically a lot of questions that would require an answer from policy, practice and yeah, a lot of research.
It's only somehow the beginning of a process as we would see it.
Darek: Thank you, Adina.
You mentioned it a lot in the research, but you analyzed also a lot of programs and a lot of papers actually in Europe, both from European level, but also local regional and the national level.
And yes, you highlighted these challenges, what you mentioned, especially in education and also what comes out after COVID-19 pandemic: the digital inclusion that goes together with social includes, participation and also employment.
So these are the areas that you tackled in the research paper, highlighting these challenges.
Karen, how do you see these challenges from your perspective as a practitioner, but also policy maker, because you are a member of the Advisory Council, how do you see these challenges?
Karen: Thank you, Darek.
First of all, I want to congratulate the partnership for a very comprehensive research on rural youth, which is one of the few documents actually reflecting on the issues, needs and asprirations of rural youth.
And this comes to show that rural youth has not been a priority for a long time in Europe.
Though, this is something which has needed to be tackled for a long time ago, due to the lack of opportunities, lack of infrastructure, lack of access to all the services that rural youth are having for a long time.
In terms of what should be done.
I believe that we need to start having standards for rural youth inclusion and participation on the policy level.
This is how we should start.
We shouldn't start doing things, which will just include some of them, but we need to come up with a standard which should come from an upper level, from the European level to the national level and go down to the local level.
Mostly we are thinking about from the bottom up.
But I think bottom up works only at the time when everything is there.
So the standars are there.
And if we do something in a local level, we can have impact, but it's not a long-term impact.
And sometime we will stop it and we will not doing it in a quality way.
So that's the reason that why the advisory council, and the portfolio on young people in rural communities is trying to set up the policy standard within the Council of Europe, which will reinforce the need of inclusion of young people in rural communities.
As Adina said, they have very complex problems and unfortunately, by this time, all the documents, all the policy documents have approached rural youth as one social category, which is mainly like geographic one.
So if you live in a rural community, will just mention in the policy document that we are also including rural youth, but within the rural youth, there are other sub categories.
There are multiple identities, like, there are young people with disabilities who have completely different needs and issues because they live in an less accessible community.
There are minorities which are in Europe, mostly, settled in, in the rural areas who have completely different, problems that need to be tackled.
There are also young women who are also having some other problems just because they live in a rural or conservative areas.
And I believe that we need to set standards in a policy is which approach rural youth intersectionally and all the things that we want to do need to be tailor made.
I don't want to jump in and say that this needs to be done in terms of the activities of inclusion, because a lot of research and a lot of thoughts should be put under what we are doing.
And there is another thing which also came to us.
There is no much data, as Adina said also, there's not much data about rural youth.
And mostly the data that is available is in EU level, not in the Council of Europe.
So the information which is there is not also accessible to us.
That's why we need to go to the national level to gather data and based on the data to propose some policy measures and standards.
This is what I would suggest right now.
I really don't want to jump in and say, we need to do this and to do this.
I think the first thing that we need to do is to set up the policy standard of rural youth inclusion.
Darek: We jumped immediately into policy, which is very interesting.
And I think it's very, very important because this is what the paper says, that there is a lot of also conclusions and the recommendations when it comes to policy.
I still would like to come back a little bit to practices on the local and national level, because the paper also describes a lot of very successful initiatives, actions that were taken either by non-governmental actors or sometimes by the governments.
One of the example that just got stuck in my head was the example from Serbia when the pandemic started, where there were workshops proposed to young people how to use online tools.
Then also the example from Czech Republic about the local action groups, which is I think a very interesting example, which responds to the needs of young people in the rural areas and the challenges that they face.
If we can talk about this a little bit about this different examples and in different places in Europe, how they work and why they are successful, what they should focus on.
It's examples of youth work, examples of what the governments can do, what the local governments are doing.
I think that's interesting to see what are these examples that are actually addressing the challenges related to employment, to social inclusion, to participation of young people or digital inclusion.
Adina: I think it's extremely relevant and definitely from what we saw when documenting the paper if you have few examples, then that would get people getting inspired on trying out their own initiative somehow.
We managed to collect the information with the support of our EKCYP and fellow researchers and correspondents.
And somehow we saw that it's a tendency of non-governmental organizations to try to come up with initiatives that would work in their own community.
So, plenty of examples of detached and mobile youth work initiatives that were happening in different countries.
So, somehow being inspired by, for example, we have the, from the UK where you have these practices for a lot of years, and then seeing them in Malta and Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, where we understand that it's needed trying to learn from other contexts and to bring them in countries where you might not have the infrastructure.
So speaking here of youth centers of facilities that would allow you to work with young people living in the rural areas, but then you do come with other working approaches that, you know, would allow you still to work even without this infrastructure.
So, many examples of this kind of youth work approaches.
As you mentioned, there were countries that also shared the examples of mainly ministries of youth and sport trying to support somehow young people with fewer opportunities, including here young people living in the rural areas, but I would personally see it as the level two.
So, coming with some action for young people who already had access to equipment and also to internet, but somehow level one is still unresolved.
So how to speak of digital participation and to access to online learning for those young people would not have the equipment or the competencies to be part of the process.
So level one, it's still somehow unresponded in different countries.
What we also saw when documenting our paper was that in some countries, the international donors support the development of different projects and programs that were quite successful in working with young people in the rural communities.
Georgia, for example, had some projects already, and there are others that are still under development.
So there is some practices, but there's still a lot to be done.
Karen: As Adina said, there are some practices, which may have very good results on a local level.
And unfortunately, those practices that are in the domain of the NGOs, usually the NGOs are the ones who are initiating this kind of things in order to provide access to young people from rural communities.
But then at the same time there is an issue of having really NGOs and structures in the rural communities.
This is something which also hinders rural youth to have access to youth work services, youth services, which are not available in the municipal level.
And unfortunately it's throughout Europe that youth work still remains in the agenda of the NGOs mostly, not in the agenda of the governments.
That's why I think the policies that should be said in there should focus on giving the space, physical space at the local level, in the regional level for young people from rural communities to get engaged in the social and political activities and to have the structures within their communities.
The consolidation process of rural communities, which have been going in Europe already for a while it's really challenging access to participation of rural youth as well.
So the communities are getting larger.
The administrative centers are being in place in a bigger community, which does not have access, to which not all young people have access.
It really hinders the participation of young people in the decision-making processes as well at local level.
One of the solution could be the digital participation, which can be put in place, but as Adina said that there's another issue, which is lack of infrastructure, digital infrastructure.
So in some communities, internet is the problem still.
We live in 21st century, but the internet is problem also in rural communities.
Some people do not have equipment because of their social economic background.
They cannot afford it.
Those are the things that also needs to be tackled.
This is one of the most relevant issues, especially during the COVID time.
Because this showcase that real issue when in rural communities, like, as a family with social economic low back have like three kids and one equipment and the 3 kids have to participate in online classes, how, how they can manage to do that.
The pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic really, really emphasized the need to focus more on people living in rural communities.
I don't want to generalize and say that all the people in rural communities have like lower socioeconomic background.
But I think, it's fact that, no matter your socioeconomic background, they have the same issues in terms of lack of accessibility to some of the services, some of the available things that you can easily access because you live in an urban area.
Tanya: Maybe I can add that what I found interesting in the paper is not that it highlights some of the structural and repeated challenges that we might have read a few years ago, but there are some patterns that show that quite a few policies are going in parallel and initiatives.
So agricultural initiatives, now they are going more towards, for example, there is also a change in thinking that particularly rural areas should invest more in environmental protection.
And maybe that is also an opportunity for these programs, for these policies to have another vision of the young people that live in their communities.
There, they are probably important actors in that reflection.
And it's the same for youth policies.
I would say that it's quite clear in countries that have a focus on strengthening municipal level management and regional level management.
So some sort of administrative reforms, then you can see that there is also reflection.
Okay.
But what do we do with the young people who live in those areas?
So they may think about investing in some programs that support young people there.
So, there are these parallel initiatives, but it's clear that if young people still today in those communities, especially in the communities that are further from urban centers, if they still feel ignored, if they still feel that they are diverse, but no one sees that diversity except for themselves in their own close groups of friends.
If they still feel that participation, if it's offered it's tokenistic it's okay we'll give you a space where you can talk, but there is no dialogue.
There's no openness of dialogue.
There is no clarity of who are the young people in this particular community who wants to do what and how can they be supported?
As Karen was saying, this kind of tailored support, then we need to reflect also on the standards that exist already.
So for example, there is the Charter on Participation of Young People in Local Life.
This has been one of the most successful tools.
It had a very active engagement at some point.
There was a lot of work with really small communities to try to develop participatory structures, councils of young people, advisory structures.
We need to go back to those and see if it has worked in the past why should we not remember and invest more in it?
And I think that's the reality of data coming into play and in decision in driving decisions on many levels.
Even local level allows people to maybe start to think more together, more holistically.
So it's not that we need to think how many trees we have to save in this plant, in this community.
This is how it used to be probably this centralized planning, but there is space for every actor.
So for every young person, but also policy maker in local communities, in small communities to open up some dialogue, to talk together and to drive together the development of that community, that values the young people.
So at least what I read in this one of the conclusions also that most rural policies ignore youth and many youth policies ignore rural youth.
It's time to have a bridge between those and probably NGOs for sure, youth sector has that active role, a bridge builder, bringing that voice, that need, that shading light on the fact that young people are diverse in community all over the place, in the rural community as well, they are diverse.
And this diversity has to be seen as a positive thing and as a driver of change as well.
Darek: Thank you, Tanya.
You basically very nicely summarized this discussion.
But I still would like to come back to the policy level and also a little bit connecting to what you were saying.
In some of the previous episodes of our podcast when we were discussing digitalization, social inclusion and young people, we hosted some of the youth workers who are coming from a rural areas, who were doing detached youth work, like the example of Scottish
Highlands, where they managed to really create this sense of of having an impact, of actually shaping the local community and having a voice through using, for example, social media, and getting in engaged with local politicians, which they never did actually.
So there are really this examples where it's possible.
And what you said, Karen, yes, I agree that most of the youth work is done by NGOs, but in this case, it's actually the public service.
It's something that's provided by the government.
Thank you, Tanya, for what you said.
Yeah, I was very surprised when reading the paper, a lot of youth policies, actually that tackle the issue of rural youth are quite outdated.
Some of them come from seventies, eighties, which probably doesn't reflect very much the world we are living nowadays.
Some of it is recent, like the Charter that you mentioned, Tanya, which has been used by the Council of Europe a lot, especially in the projects on social rights with young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods and also ENTER project that is also mentioned in the paper.
We were talking about standards, the needs of policies that are mentioned in the conclusions of the paper.
So, what now?
What can be done now, for example, in the Advisory Council?
Is there anything done by the youth voice in the Advisory Council in the Council of Europe to advance these policies or the standards that we are talking about?
Karen: Thank you, Darek for the question.
So in this mandate, the Advisory Council established a portfolio on young people in the rural communities, which have been working in the last one year and a half in order to understand whether the policies that are in place, the recommendations under policy documents are in place can be reinforced in order to make more changes in, in terms of rural youth.
And I can say that now rural youth is already reflected in the priorities of the youth sector for the next two years and also in the priorities of the European Youth Foundation.
So this is one of the successes of the work that Advisory Council has put together.
On the other note, we have established a working group within the Joint Council on Youth to explore the possibilities of possible new measures that we can propose to the youth sector, to the Committee of Ministers in order to reflect the issues, needs and aspirations
of rural youth in our policy documents and come up with new measures possibly to tackle the rural youth issues intersectionally and come up with tailor made mechanisms and measures.
So, based on the consultations and also based on the review of the current recommendations one of them you already mentioned, or two of them, we came up with the proposal for the Joint Council to establish a drafting group, which will work on the CM recommendation especially on rural youth, on their social, economic and political participation.
I think when we talk about the political participation and economic participation, it's to me, it's a little bit unrealistic, when rural youth are really struggling with their social rights.
So if they don't have a good education, they have an issue with finding a job or having a housing, we cannot expect them to be part of any decision making processes.
So, that's why we need to tackle this participation from social economic and political aspects all together in order to have some effective and productive work for rural youth.
Tanya: Maybe just to complement that rural youth was part of the previous Croatian presidency of the EU focus of the EU youth dialogue.
And actually that was also an important momentum to bring up, based on the consultation that the youth dialogue does and to have this conference focused on it.
And there are Council conclusions.
It's very important that the tool major European organizations that have focus on youth that they go hand-in-hand, that they go in parallel and then each of them thinks, what can they do better?
How they can deploy the instruments and the tools they have for supporting young people?
How can they complement each other?
And this is where I think that this research is important as well.
Of course we could not look into everything.
But already here, there is so much as a good basis to start to have this more coherent and complimentary reflection on who can do what.
For example, how can the new youth programs of the EU be better adjusted, be more open, be more tailored as well?
Just like the European Youth Foundation has to reflect how to make their granting offers.
More accessible and so on.
So at all levels, it's not just with funding, it's at all levels that we have to think and rethink what we have, if it works enough and if it's accessible enough and if it can help have an impact.
Adina: Well, I would say that basically we're somehow better than we were two years ago, because as Tanya was mentioning where it was during the Croatian presidency and we have some strong recommendations and we also had the consultations with young people.
We have the, yeah the working group and the willingness of the Council of Europe of taking, furthering the agenda, the subject.
We also have this beginning of a research process with the paper.
I would say that except changing the approach to the rights based perspective.
We know what the needs and challenges are.
And basically I would say that they're not that much different that young people in general I would like at times to start speaking of the interests and aspirations, not of the needs because yeah, we are speaking a lot about all these needs, but they're still there.
And if the responses are not happening, then let's start maybe with the interests and aspirations.
Even if some policies and programs might have not been successful just because they were developed for young people and not consulting them and having them involved in the process.
And I would say that this goes with the aspirations and interests because developing things for them would not work.
And yeah, this is why we need young people in the process and to understand what they want in fact.
And I would really like to see, a lot of things happening with and for young people living in the rural communities as for the policy domain will having get mentioned in the national youth strategies that young people in the rural areas are there, it's not enough.
You need measures to support.
You also need money because yeah it's a wonderful philosophical subject, but in the end without the financial allocation would not work, but I really want to see the the discourse, moving to aspirations and interests a bit.
But somehow let's stop working only on the project based approach.
So the project is finished and then the intervention is finished.
And let's ask somehow, let's try to get the support of the authorities to, to continue.
So let's seriously think about the sustainability of our actions.
Darek: It was a very good summary of what we were talking about in this episode.
Thank you,Adi na.
Thank you, Tanya and Karen for your input.
The research paper is available on the partnership website, and you can find the link to the research paper in the notes to this episode.
Thanks a lot and goodbye.