Director’s Editorial – May Issue

“Our future in our hands”

Dear Friends,

welcome to the new issue of our YE Online Magazine, one of the most particular we decided to create, for different reasons that I will try to summarise here.

As you may see, there is an interesting title I decided to use for my usual presentation: our future in our hands. You should have noticed that we anticipated May’s issue to the 28th. And if you click on the link appearing on this text, you will be redirected to the official website of the European Youth Week.

In the past weeks we had an interesting (while unfortunately virtual) meeting with our FMO and we talked about the projects’ results and achievements and we remembered all together that the European Youth Week is taking place exactly from the 24th to the 30th of this month.

The word “youth” is self-explanatory. We are, as said, into an important reporting period – made of list of results, challenges faced, objectives achieved, etc. – and we strongly believed that our Projects could be a proof, a concrete example, of the need to show and present what they are doing towards youth. Their results, your results, are the practical concretisation of what can be done for youngest generation, particularly in terms of employment, of what still need to be done in terms of a future to be better constructed.

For that reason, we have involved our Youth Employment Fund’s Projects to collect their main achievements in order to create a sort of “special” issue, strictly connected to the European Youth Week. We hope that you can find there further hints, new sources of inspiration and research. I have to thank all the Projects of our Family that contributed: I believe that seeing the collection of all their “singular” results can be considered as a common goal achieved together. After all, YE Projects have different fields of action and specialisation but… they run for the same achievement, which has to do – guess – with young people. I am sure that they also share the need to create, somehow, a better future for younger generation.

Related to that, within the following pages you will have the chance to read something about another important results that for us has been fundamental in terms of best practices: Let’s NEET together, the clustering initiative created and organised by SEPAL, has come to the third edition. A lot of people and different Projects were involved and we, as FO, together with FMO, participated to that event. We perceived, another time, the natural interest of Projects to act together sharing efforts toward the achievement of common goals (another time…). That is why we decided to dedicate a special place again to this best practice, in order that this can be for you all an example of what can be achieved despite the unfortunate time we are facing in the middle of a pandemic. We all hope that this is coming to an end and that, therefore, we can shortly go back to physical meeting and activities but… meanwhile we cannot help but continue to strive and do our best by making the most of our skills, just as SEPAL did by creating a unique precedent.

This as a lot to do also with the focus of this issue: globalisation, technology, e-services, impacts on local systems… these days we are touching those concepts more than ever and experimenting the concrete consequences on our daily activities. Consequences that have to do exactly with the future we are constructing with our hands.

I believe that this issue has a lot in it. A lot of good practices, a lot of results and achievements and a lot of hints for further reflections. I think that we can consider it as a sort of milestone in our full set of issues, through which we always try to reserve for your ideas the best space and time.

As always, I am thanking anyone of you that contributed to create this space and used his/her time toward something that makes saying: it’s worth it.

I hope you will enjoy (and disseminate) our special on the European Youth Week and all the rest of interesting contents you can find in the following, rich pages.

Gian Luca Bombarda
The Fund Director

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