The yearly award of European Youth Capital (EYC) provides title holders with an opportunity to not only present their existing initiatives targeted at youth but also an outstanding and utmost crucial platform to improve their programmes and policies for and by young people on various levels. Whilst locally addressing youth-related aspects, municipalities implement the frameworks of mutual European youth policy goals. Thus improving and strengthening a common European youth agenda as well as creating spaces and opportunities for youth participation and enhancing a sense of European, national and local citizenship. IIt is the goal of the project to facilitate the sharing and exchanging of best practices between Youth Capitals to ensure that whilst the title of European Youth Capital is duly transferred from city to city so are the lessons and knowledge associated with it. The basis considered is that, an awareness of the complementary nature of municipal, national and European levels amongst young people allows for a sustainable implementation and understanding of European policy dimensions. The project is specifically targeted at youth workers, leaders of youth NGOs, practitioners working on youth-related programmes within the municipalities as well as local authority representatives, all as the target group identified to be directly involved in the implementation of EYC related programmes as well as the youth agenda and activities of cities. The following objectives are intended to be met: - The exchange of best practices and lessons learned amongst past, present and future European Youth Capitals;- Identifying and analysing successful approaches and projects developed by past European Youth Capitals in order to understand the structures implemented to achieve this and therefore their applicability in other Youth Capitals;- Capacity building of practitioners within the partner cities to strengthen and ensure outstanding outputs and implementation of activities related to the awarded title of European Youth Capital;- Assessing the impact of and current link between activities locally carried out within the framework of the award and youth programmes at national and European level;- Developing a handbook including the outcomes of the knowledge transfer between the Youth Capitals, showcasing strategies and recommended successful practices that will support future title holding cities in the improvement of the quality of their youth programmes.During the project, a training course, a seminar, conference and the mapping of successful strategies and best practice activities will shape the outcome of a manual of best practices whilst building capacities of participants and partner organisations. These concrete outputs will serve as a support for the improvement of the quality of EYC youth activities and enable efficient achievement of positive and sustainable programmes. Also, municipalities interested in applying for the EYC award, through the documented outcomes of the project, have the opportunity to review methodologies that have proven successful and understand processes that have been optimised by past EYCs. Reducing the hurdle for municipalities to prepare themselves for an application and ensuring that the quality of outcomes continues to improve. The project will have an impact on over 5000 individuals and its outputs (e.g. manual of best practices) on even more. There will be an impact on the awareness amongst young people of the European dimension and its role and home on local level youth policies which will in turn lead to a society of young people aware of the meaning and outcomes of their European citizenship as well as their role at their local level.

Com’ON Europe connects two specific aspects, youth participation and participatory budgeting, and this way it becomes original, unique. The reason for this is that it keeps the principle of participatory budgeting (deciding on public money’s faith) but it provides a double-sided platform through the engagement with mostly unorganised young people willing to organise themselves but not in legally established organisations. This enables bringing forward untapped energies of young people in shaping community life in cities.All partners came from former European Youth Capital cities: Torino 2010, Braga 2012, Maribor 2013, Thessaloniki 2014, Cluj-Napoca 2015, Varna 2017 and Cascais 2018. The European Youth Capital is a title awarded by the European Youth Forum designed to empower young people, boost youth participation and strengthen European identity. Each year, a new European city is given the chance to showcase its innovative ideas, projects and activities that aim to raise up young voices and bring a new youth perspective to all aspects of city life.The GOAL of this project was to create an open source framework for European cities in implementing participatory budgeting processes for youth, which address young people not just as creators and initiators but also as decision makers themselves while also creating a platform for cooperation for cities which applied similar processes or are willing to apply it in the future.The GENERAL OBJECTIVE of this project was to contribute to the improvement of civic participation of young people in local life through local level participatory budgeting mechanisms. It sought to contribute to the increase young people’s spirit of creativity, associativity, entrepreneurship, and community development by providing a safe environment for planning and coming forward as informal groups with small-scale initiatives, while providing funding on behalf of the municipalities, and delegating decisions towards the local community about which initiatives to be supported.The project worked to achieve the following SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:O1: to create a clear general policy framework in order to increase civic participation of young people through dedicated participatory budgeting processes for youth in urban communities based on theory and practice which connects European policies with local level practical implementation, while also bringing up local experience to the European playfield (LOCAL-EUROPEAN),O2: to provide participatory urban environments for young people and for public authorities based on trust, assistance and easy access and with the active contribution of the civil society (DECISION, VOTE), to reach out to young people and to enable their creativity serving the quality of life and the sense of belonging and ownership in cities (IDEA, INITIATIVE),O3: to enable other cities to adopt similar participatory processes and to consolidate the cooperation of European cities (and especially cities involved in the Network of European Youth Capitals) regarding youth participation through the creation of the Citizen Y Resource Centre and an open source methodology and toolkit (NETWORK, FRAMEWORK).The project’s results in key numbers:* 1 framework in 7 European languages, available open source for scaling and multiplication,* 1 new brand for participatory budgeting for youth: Com’ON Europe, * 5 key elements of a framework for Participatory Budgeting for Youth in Europe (white paper, resource centre, toolkit for participatory budgeting processes and the European group of youth facilitators),* 7 Participatory Budgeting for Youth Action Plans in 7 cities from 6 countries for 2019, which are harmonised by methodology,* 24 tools of empowering young people at local level collected in a single toolkit,* 28 youth facilitators organised in a European network which can be deployed in an international environment in order to provide further scaling,* 2,885 young people involved in co-creating ideas and proposals for initiatives to be funded by participatory budgeting for youth,* 6,000 European level stakeholders targeted by dissemination activities and publications,* 63,550 people expressing their choice for initiatives proposed by young people,* 625,000 euro allocated for small scale initiatives of informal groups of young people through participatory budgeting for youth processes,* 1.611 million people reached altogether.The strategic project was built on 14 management activities, 4 intellectual outputs with a total of 12 activities, 2 training activities of staff (short term) and 4 multiplier events.

"BACKGROUNDIn the intervention work with young people, although there is a wide range of practice at European level, there is still no sharing and dissemination of practices carried out in European countries in order to identify and define the best and/or most young people's problems and needs.In addition, young people adopt an attitude of criticism and resignation to their problems and feel excluded from the decision-making process. Youth workers do not yet have adequate skills and tools to include young people in processes of active participation, co-management and co-responsibility. By precisely disregarding the needs of young people and lacking tools to help them diagnose them, they have difficulty reaching their target group and ensuring an active and empowering intervention of social transformation.OBJETIVES1) Identify, collect and systematize European good practice of intervention and response to the problems in youth;2) Reinforce European networks and the ability to operate at transnational level;3) Plan, test and validate strategies and practices in the youth context;4) Systematize a methodology (quantitative and qualitative) for obtaining, data analysis and support the development of a participatory strategy and their plans in youth;5) Stimulate a critical attitude, active and entrepreneurial society for the development of new youth policies;6) Develop knowledge, tools and content of free access to target groups.PARTICIPANTSParticipants are:- Youth workers.Indirect participants/beneficiaries are:- groups of young co builders who collaborate with the managing teams, assist the development of content, critics;- Young ""targets"" for the application of the methodologies, i.e., all the young people of the regions of partners.PARTICIPANTS PROFILE1) Youth workers over the age of 25;2) Share the problem, needs and objectives;3) Motivated to contribute at all stages, from planning to completion and sustainability;4) Motivated to disseminate the results;5) Proactive in creating impacts in themselves, in the target group and the communities of which they are part of;6) Interested in continuing to participate and develop projects that focus on the priorities of Erasmus+;7) Motivated to develop and stimulate the civic, participatory and entrepreneur spirit.ACTIVITIES1) Transnational meetings – initial meeting/preparation, to be held in August 2019; intermediate meeting/monitoring, to be held in January 2020; interim meeting/monitoring, to be held in May 2020 and final meeting/evaluation, to be held in September 2020;2) Preparatory and follow-up meetings (online) – July 2019 to October 2020;3) Training courses/ Seminars – December 2019 and July 2020;4) Identify, collect and systematize – September to December 2019;5) Implementation and planning – January to September 2020;6) Job shadowing – January to July 2020;7) Seminar – September 2020.METHODOLOGYNon-formal education.RESULTS AND IMPACTSAs a key result, we highlight the development of methodologies for guiding and obtaining the diagnosis of needs for the elaboration of strategic youth plans.The expected impacts on this project are:1) Training of youth and youth workers;2) Development of competences and learning based on NFE;3) Improvement of the quality of youth intervention;4) Openness to multicultural individual and collective learning;5) Increase of social, civic and democratic participation;6) Increase in the spirit of initiative and entrepreneurship;7) Increase in inclusive and participatory behaviors;8) Increase in territorial synergies;9) Development of new initiatives for civic participation, entrepreneurship and innovation;10) Promotion of values such as democracy, innovation, respect, change, tolerance, trust and dignity.BENEFTIS1) The adequacy of youth interventions will be reflected at the real needs of young people; to value youth action and the active participation of young people; the development of the sense of identity and belonging, social inclusion, intercultural dialogue and multiculturalism; the consideration of non-formal education methodology as a training methodology for youth action.2) Systematization of a methodology for guidance based on European practices of youth intervention, uniform, comparable, validated data collection and processing in terms of diagnosis and strategic planning."

"100% Youth City is KA2 Strategic partnership to develop an innovative approach to new generation of City Youth friendly Policies.The project aims to create and develop a quality label ""100% Youth City"", on Youth Friendly policies city and the all certification process to implement it.Project will combine the Structured Dialogue methodology and a new and innovative tool defined by the European Union on the Lisbon Treaty, the Open Method of Coordination. Project will start with short learning activity to learn how to work with the methodology and define milestones and budget and inance procedure for the implementation of 100% Youth City.The methodology will be implemented by defining the overall key topics and subtopics, identifying priorities and a division of learning outcomes in the certification process of ""100% Youth City"", emphasizing the key role of the youngsters and decision makers in collaboration with the project partners, Youth sector, experts and policy makers designing high quality transnational seminars and putting in place a good communication practice between transnational seminars all contribute towards good coherence in the partnership.The project will gather 7 Cities recognized by their good practices on Youth policies all future and actual European Youth Capitals, are partners of this project and we gather two more cities, Valencia as a good practice on the development of long term Strategic Youth Plans and the City of Riga as good practice on inclusion and work with minorities.The structure of the project activities is the management of one short Learning activity with all project coordinators and the management of 4 Transnational seminars.Each Transnational Seminar will conclude on process of certification, or stage as 100% Youth City and start another one. Partner will have six months between each Transnational Seminar to implement the tools and necessary indicators to achieve the certification on each stage.The project will be concluded with all 7 partners with certified as 100% Youth City and all certification process on Youth Friendly Cities ready to be disseminated as an innovative, new and powerful process to have Cities with real youth friendly policies."

LAYOUTH comes from Local Action for Youth. But it is also the combination of LAYOUT and YOUTH. Not the least, it also aims a call towards YOU with the middle letters of the newly created word. The project involves 8 cities which were nominated as European Youth Capital title bearers in time: Braga in 2012, Maribor in 2013, Thessaloniki in 2014, Cluj-Napoca in 2015, Varna in 2017, Novi Sad in 2019, Amiens in 2020 and Klaipeda in 2021.All participating cities have their own realities. Their approach towards youth-related strategic and operational planning and ecosystem-development through cross-sectorial cooperation (public, non-governmental and private) is absolutely diversified. However, cooperation is possible between these cities as there is common ground regarding the importance given to young people, their engagement, connection and empowerment as active citizens of their city’s life, and there are mutually accepted principles like co-management of strategic initiatives between the municipality and youth actors.We will change the approach on how cities should deliver for young people in a simple yet well- structured way. At least we will try. We believe LAYOUTH will become a brand and reference point on how to work for and with young people through action planning and integrated efforts of cooperation in a participatory and inclusive way. We believe these 8 cities, through their record up to this moment and their strong commitment towards youth will really be able to ignite this innovation.The main goal of the project is to consolidate the local planning and implementation systems serving youth in participating cities, aligned with European youth-related policies while setting a standard and a wide pool of intellectual resources through which any other European city can align its own local efforts towards young generation.We defined the following specific objectives for our endeavour:SO1: to create a modern, modular, complex but still easily adaptable framework and scalable model of delivering full cycles of urban youth ecosystem development built on sustainable approaches;SO2: to improve the actual youth-related planning and delivery system of participating cities on strategic and operational level putting high emphasis on engagement, connection and empowerment of young people;SO3: to engage and to empower key organisational and organisational actors in a learning process through which their capacity of a cooperation, co-creation and co-management based local action planning and delivering in the field of youth becomes sustainable while adding significantly to the quality of life of young citizens;OD (organizational development): to develop the capacity of involved partners in being key actors of the future development of youth ecosystems in their own cities and to assist other cities in addressing the same issue.… IN KEY NUMBERS …•1 modern, modular framework in 10 European languages, available open source for scaling and multiplication,•1 new brand for local action planning and delivery for youth in cities of Europe: LAYOUTH,•5 key elements of a framework for urban action planning for youth in Europe (white paper – toolkit – study cases on implemented action plans – pool of facilitators – resource centre),•8 implemented Local Action Plans for Youth in 8 cities from 8 countries, which are harmonised by methodology. All of them evaluated through study cases.•25 tools of empowering young people at local level collected in a single toolkit,•32 youth facilitators organised in a European network which can be deployed in an international environment in order to provide further scaling,•7,680 stakeholders consulted in the process,•24,000 young people consulted about their feelings about the city and their needs and contributions to their city’s life and development,•3,000+ European level stakeholders targeted by dissemination activities and publications,•1.5 million euro allocated for youth programmes and initiatives in 2020 in participating cities,•7.8 million euro allocated local budgets in partner cities for youth related investments for 2020 and 2021The project will result in the creation of a new, modern, modular, and scalable model for delivering local action plans for youth. All characteristics are carefully considered here. Modern, as something easy to understand and to apply in practice, something to which youth organisations, groups of young people can relate to easily. Modular as something which has the quality of being understood piece by piece. Adaptable as a framework which can be easily filled with local specific content while the framework itself keeps intact. And scalable as being able to be extended to an unlimited number of cities, a characteristic derived also from its adaptability. The project is built on:* 3 intellectual outputs* 3 multiplier events* 3 training activities* 8 project meetings* 8 partner/8 country cooperation