Dariusz: 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.
In our podcast, we have discussed many times the impact of COVID 19 and all restrictions related to the pandemic on the lives of young people.
Some time ago we also had an episode on the knowledge Hub: COVID 19 impact on the youth sector that was developed by the youth partnership.
The Hub has been there for a year now and since it was officially launched in October, 2020 at the Youth Knowledge Forum it has been filled with new information, research papers and other relevant materials.
In this episode, we take a closer look at how the Hub functions nowadays.
What are the findings from the questionnaires and briefings and what are the key priority themes.
We will look also at the future of the Hub.
Our guests today, Irina Lonean and James O'Donovan, the researchers involved in the development of briefings and surveys will provide us with some insights into what's new on the Hub.
My name is Dariusz Grzemny and I'm co-hosting this episode with Lana Pasic from the EU - Council of Europe youth partnership.
So, let's start.
Welcome to the next episode of our Under 30 podcast.
Today, we are talking about something that's not new because it has existed already for a year, but it's changing, it's developing.
I'm talking about the knowledge Hub on COVID-19 impact on the youth sector that was actually created a year ago.
There is a lot of things available there.
There is a lot of research.
There is a lot of possibilities to also interact, and provide data, and so on.
Let's have a look a little bit on how it functioned in the last year.
But Lana at the beginning, can you recall actually the objectives of this and why it was created and, with what intention, and in your opinion, was this intention valid and was it fulfilled?
Lana: So we started working on the Hub in spring of last year with the onset of the pandemic, realizing that there was really a need to gather the resources, data, and information about the impact of COVID-19 on young people and the impact on the youth sector at large.
But also to look at what were some of the responses coming, both from the sector, from young people, from youth organizations and also the responses from the policymakers.
So the Hub was created really to host the different types of data, information, knowledge, resources about the impact of COVID-19, as well as to provide analysis of the results of different findings from studies, from questionnaires, from surveys, not only done by the partnership, but also done by those outside of our networks.
Besides for that, it also houses the information about what is happening at the national level.
We have gathered this information through surveys to our networks of EKIP and PEYR, but also through desk review.
So trying to look at what is happening in each country, what are the impacts and what are the responses at national level, across the Council of Europe member states.
Dariusz: Thank you Lana, for reminding us what was there, what was the objective of the hub and its functions.
There is a lot of materials being put there, a lot of research papers to read.
Irina you have been, or you are one of the authors of the fourth briefing on what's actually happening when it comes to research on the impact of COVID-19 on youth sector, on youth work and youth organizations.
If you can share with us a little bit, what are the key findings?
What are the themes?
What is this impact actually?
What is the research saying about it.
Irina: Well, the knowledge hub came to bring together information that already existed in a large amount of research and papers and reports starting at the beginning of last year when the COVID 19 outbreak appeared.
But also we take into account where we don't know things that we would like to know.
And, the main findings of our analysis or meta analysis of what it's already put online, in terms of researchers that first, we have a lot of information on the fact that COVID-19 impacted the youth sector a lot at the beginning.
Youth work was designed to be mainly face to face very much in Europe, in international settings, based on mobilities, very much based on a personal relationship between the youth worker and young people that happened in youth centers or in places where people actually met face to face.
And this was a very important part of youth work.
And because of COVID-19 all this important part of youth work disappeared for a while, and then it needed to be reinvented because of a lot of restrictions of physical distancing rules and so on.
So this is the first thing that, from the point of view of how youth workers and the youth sector approach youth, young people, we needed a change of methodology and we needed to use something that existed, but was a lot less developed until last year that it's online youth work and digital youth work.
The second thing is that, we noticed that at least in 2020, but things seem to be continued in 2021, the youth sector was not considered an essential sector of services for people affected by COVID-19.
And this meant that many youth organizations, youth centers, institutions working with young people suffered a lot in terms of loss of resources and they didn't have the support they needed to continue their work and to learn new methods to engage with young people in the new settings, with physical distancing, and so on.
The third thing it's that these are, let's say, bad news.
The good news is that we also saw that young people and youth workers mobilized to organize young people to support the response to COVID-19.
And I would say that we want to focus a bit more on this response to COVID-19 and how young people participated and new ideas to engage with young people in the next publications that we prepare for the knowledge hub.
So we will, we try to pass from providing information on the impact of COVID on the youth sector to new ideas on how the youth sector is developing in response to this impact.
Dariusz: Thank you Irina.
It's good that there is not only bad news because the bad news we probably all know because we had a couple of podcasts, a couple of episodes before, on the impact of COVID-19 on the youth sector, but there's also good news.
There's one point that struck me a bit, a lot actually, because it appears everywhere.
Also in the research regarding formal education, it's this disappearance of young people, this losing touch, losing contact or losing young people actually on the way which happened in formal education while it was online.
And also it happened in youth work online, like losing contact with people, especially coming from the underprivileged groups and also young people with fewer opportunities, which is a very bad sign.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about the gaps because we have been talking a lot in this podcast about the lack of evidence, the lack of research, the lack of data.
I mean, definitely a lot has been done in the past year, but there is still things missing.
There is still a lot of information, a lot of data missing.
What are these gaps?
Irina, James, maybe we can reflect a little bit on that.
Irina: If I may, I think first gap that we identified and it's to an extent easy to explain why we have this gap.
But we are looking now for more research on this, it's the attention to the long-term impact of COVID-19 on young people and on the youth sector.
On young people, because we had a year where the life of all young people and all people, for that matter, actually changed and we started to interact differently.
And for young people development, how they interact with the others, it's extremely important for the future.
The long-term impact of COVID-19 pandemic and how the new normal is appearing, it's something that we need to continue to research.
And this is also applicable to the youth sector because the youth sector actually learned to use more digital youth work and digital tools.
And it's interesting to see how going beyond the pandemic some of the things will be kept and integrated in the larger pool of methods of youth work.
James: I think just in general and from my own experience of doing the surveys and so forth, when you're in the middle of the storm, it's very hard to find land somewhere.
And what's significant about the pandemic is that, that initially when we did the first survey, which was an autumn of last year, we looked specifically at the initial lockdown and it was to try and get some assessment of how the initial shock was.
We did a second survey then in the beginning of this year.
And that was to look at the full year long impact of the pandemic, because what had happened by then and what we couldn't have known was why there had been some easing of lockdown and across Europe in the late summer, in October of last year.
By the winter, most countries were back into a lockdown.
And it's only now hopefully with the vaccination program that we may be emerging from the pandemic itself.
Though, there's still a bit of a question mark, I think over what happens this winter, that's going to be the real test.
From our own research on the surveys and so forth, there is a, I think a lot of people feel we're too close to the storm, really to get a clear picture of what it's like.
So therefore trying to do research now is going to face a lot of handicaps.
Having said that some countries have undertaken a fair amount of research already.
So I think there's a kind of a half and half situation at the moment.
But I think certainly going forward that there are two areas in particular, which are going to be very important in terms of research, but these, they pose particular problems.
I mean, one of the big issues that's emerged from the pandemic and it's no great surprise with this issue of mental health of young people and the stress and the anxiety they've gone over the past two years.
Now somebody might make the not unreasonable argument that this is a temporary, so to speak.
And that once the cause of stress and strain is removed, which is the pandemic then you won't have such stress and strain on young people anymore, but I think what the pandemic has highlighted that is highlighted this issue of mental health and wellbeing among young people, which has always been an issue, but which perhaps hasn't got the kind of focus that is required.
On the digital front we have unique opportunity now that we won't, I think have again, because as Irina was saying during the pandemic because of social distancing and indeed socialized isolation.
And the only thing that was available for communication, for information for youth work was true digital means.
Now up until then digitalization had been a feature of the youth sector, but during the pandemic, it became the only show in town.
So I think that going forward, we need to use this window when digitalization was the only form of youth work, youth service, youth information, and examine it a much more closely to try and learn how well prepared was the sector for digitalization, did they have the capacity?
Did they have the training and how do they use it?
Did they open up new ways of doing youth work and so forth?
So I think that's going to be a particular area for research going forward.
Thank you.
Irina: If I may add two things, and I would say I can be responsible for optimism in this podcast.
The things that we noticed being done by the youth sector and young people sometimes organizing by themselves during the pandemic are going in different directions.
But two are the main ones that we observed.
The first one it's intergenerational solidarity.
And I think that we can go into looking more in-depth into this theme and encouraging more youth sector to work on this, taking into account how the impact of COVID was generally impacting the societies.
And the second one, bigger attention to how information is delivered to young people, because misinformation and fake news have been an important feature of the pandemic.
Then, youth organizations and youth workers, and groups of young people organizing themselves to provide information and to ensure correct true flow of information between authorities and trustable sources of information towards the young people.
This is also something that happened and can be used as good practices to share and case studies for research to see how it can be developed.
Lana: Just to follow on both Irina's and Jim's argument.
I think we have seen through this research that during the pandemic youth sector and young people have proven to be adaptable, resilient, flexible, innovative.
But also we have seen that in order to continue to do so youth sector still needs to be supported by the policy.
And, we have seen that there are areas which particularly need support.
Young people's mental health and wellbeing has been impacted.
The research clearly shows that, and we are doing more investigation in this, through the survey to EKIP and PEYR, but also through additional desk research.
But we have also seen that young people's social rights have been impacted, not only through the fact that young people have been particularly affected when it comes to employment, but this has also had an effect then on young people's housing, for example, and the ability to be independent and to, to transition to autonomous living.
Digitalization has certainly helped youth sector to thrive during this time to be able to conduct the activities, but this is also something that we are seeing that youth work, as Irina said, has been quite used to conducting activities in a certain way.
And while there has been innovation, adaptation, there are still things that we clearly know can't be done online and that we still are very much in need of face-to-face activities to be able to really conduct our work.
In terms of the gaps, as Jim mentioned, there's still more to be seen, particularly in terms of long-term effect.
I think when it comes to mental health, we also have the issue of PTSD that will be coming up after the pandemic, that is still too early to research at this stage.
Dariusz: Thank you, Lana for this.
Yes, youth work adapted, was resilient and flexible.
In many instances, youth policy was not, which is also coming from the research.
The response came quite late, sometimes or it never happened actually in case of small organizations that were not actually able to function.
And also when we look at the European youth strategies, which we have discussed in the last episode, they also were created in the pre- COVID times.
So they also don't include a lot of aspects.
Though, there is a very strong response from the European Youth Work Convention that actually highlighted all the issues that came about in the times of COVID.
Okay.
I understand that it's still important to have this knowledge hub, and it's still developing, as you said, there is a lot of gaps hopefully going to be filled in the next year, and there is a new questionnaire that was already sent to EKIP and PEYR members.
If we can talk about it a little bit now.
How does it differ from the previous surveys?
What is its focus?
And when we can expect the results of maybe even get a little bit of a taste of the results, because I know that they are collected, but not analyzed yet.
James, if I can ask you to talk about it a bit.
James: Thank you.
Yes, I've been involved in the three surveys that have been conducted to date.
The first one was done in the autumn of last year and its purpose really was to try and grasp the initial impact, particularly the lockdown, the initial lockdown, which went from mid-March to, shall we say, late June across Europe.
We then did a second survey earlier this year, which looked at the full year long impact of all of the actual pandemic.
Now, both of these surveys were broadly similar in approach because they were trying to look at the impact, not just the impact of the pandemic, but also the response to it.
And in general, they focused in on a number of key areas.
First of all, there was the issue of communication.
How were you and young people communicated with during the pandemic itself?
We then looked at how, what the impact was on, on the lives of young people and how they responded, how it impacted on youth workers and so forth.
Then we looked at the role of the state, however, that manifests itself, whether it's at a national level or regional level, local level, but how did the public respond to the impact of the pandemic.
And we also then looked at how the voluntary sector responded to the pandemic and the impact that it had on NGOs and so forth.
The second survey, more or less reflected what we learned from the first survey.
There were a number I think, of important issues that came out of that and some of those had to do with the whole issue of communication, and how the communication was handled during the pandemic, but also what the communication or lack of communication actually revealed.
The other thing that came out of that, I think was that the pandemic tended to exacerbate problems and issues that we've known about for a long time.
And one of the most striking things that emerged from it was that those countries which have well established or / and well supported youth sector, where the state, for instance, at whatever level national, regional, local supports young people, youth organizations, invest, has coherent policies and so forth.
Those countries, they experience difficulties, but by and large, they survived so to speak what was not the case or was much less the case where those areas and those countries in Europe, which are largely reliant on NGOs and on project funding.
These are the countries and the organizations that were really hit.
Now that the problem I think, was not so much that there were cuts in allocations, cuts in funding per se, because by the time the pandemic it impacted in March last year, most funding tends to be allocated anywhere.
The problem was not, shall we say at the supply end, it was at the demand end.
People had difficulty in expending money and this and that made projects and NGOs particularly vulnerable because they could either get money or if they got money, they couldn't use it because project funding it tends to be focused.
So I think that was, there were two big issues which came out of it.
The other issues that emerged with the issue of mental health, which I've mentioned before, and also the issue to digitalization.
Now in the most recent survey, which we did during the autumn, and we've only begun to analyze it.
We focused really on 3 areas, so to speak.
First of all, was the impact of mental health and the problems around that.
And the other one was on digitalization to try and explore more how digitalization operated, functioned during the pandemic.
And we also have a section which really is looking forward and it addresses the issue of the recovery plan, which again has significant policy implications.
How was this recovery money going to be expended?
To what extent will the youth sector actually get some of this money and then when it gets the money, what is it going to do with it?
So in a sense, this final survey will look back at the two previous surveys, try and highlight the big issues that emerge, and also look forward as to how some of these issues might be addressed in terms of policy developments in the future.
Lana: So, as Jim said, the survey that we did now focuses on specific themes and topics.
And also the briefings that we did recently, especially the last three are also focused on impact of COVID either in specific areas or on specific groups of young people.
This is the direction that we will be taking in our following briefings and research on the impact of COVID.
So for example, our latest briefing looks at the impact of the pandemic on the NEET, so young people that are not in employment, education or training in rural areas.
So we are really looking at some very specific cases where the impact of pandemic might have been greater than on the overall or average population of young people.
We'll also be exploring the impact of the pandemic in two regions that are of the interest of the partnership.
And this research is now ongoing, because we have seen that, perhaps the data might not be there or is collected differently.
And as Jim also mentioned the policy responses in different countries were quite different.
And we will also be looking at the impact of the pandemic on the access to youth services.
So there is more coming, stay tuned to the hub and we look forward to sharing the findings with the youth sector.
Dariusz: Thank you Irina and thank you James.
Thank you, Lana, for telling us what's coming next in the hub.
There is already, as I said, a lot of material and also a lot of topics that we have mentioned here, like such as homelessness of young people, there is a lot of material on social inclusion of young people, which we also tackled in some of the episodes of our podcast.
So please go to the hub and useit, because it's there actually to support youth work, youth policy and young people in the end.
Thank you.
And goodbye.