Youth Voices

Meet Youth Voices

What if the tools youth workers use to support young people were built with young people; not just for them?

That’s the question driving Youth Voices! Youth Empowerment for Well-being and Civic Engagement, a new Erasmus+ project that Sosped Foundation is proud to be part of. Across five European countries, the project is developing a new methodology for youth work; one that puts mental health and active citizenship at the center, and young people at the very heart of it.

The project is coordinated by Zavod Mladinska mreža MaMa (Slovenia) in partnership with Pista Magica (Portugal), Südwind (Austria), Civic Association GRIT (North Macedonia), and Sosped Foundation (Finland). It is co-funded by the European Union and runs from September 2025 to August 2027.

Two Issues Identified, One Vision

Youth workers across Europe are navigating two of the most urgent challenges of our current time: young people’s mental health and their sense of connection to democratic life. These challenges don’t exist in isolation – a young person struggling with anxiety is also more likely to feel disconnected from their community, from politics, and from their own future.

Youth Voices! is built on the belief that youth work can bridge the gap, but only if it has the right tools, based on the real experiences of young people.

To understand what those tools should look like, the project began with research. A research phase was conducted that included a survey of 391 young people and 140 youth workers across the five partner countries, alongside a compendium of 36 good practices in the field. What emerged was a clear picture of what’s working, what’s missing, and what young people actually need.

Building Something New 

The heart of the project is a new youth work methodology: a practical, modular toolkit that youth workers can pick up and use, whatever their context or starting point. Rather than prescribing a single approach, it is designed to be flexible: a process with multiple entry points, adaptable to different organisations, cultures, and communities.

The methodology moves through five phases; from reaching young people who aren’t yet engaged, through building trust and co-creating together, to reflecting on what’s been learned and sustaining the impact over time. 

Young people aren’t just the target audience for this work. They’re co-creators of it. Youth dialogues at national and international level will give hundreds of young people a direct channel to decision-makers, including a final international dialogue in Brussels in 2027.

What’s Coming

Over the next time period of the project, we will produce digital handbooks for youth workers, online training programmes, collections of good practices, quality standards, and five national memorandums; each one shaped by the young people involved. The project will culminate in an international youth dialogue in Brussels, bringing together 150 young people from across Europe to present their vision for the future to EU decision-makers.

Sosped’s role spans the entire project: leading the research and methodology development on the mental health strand, co-developing the dissemination strategy, and building a sustainability model to ensure the tools and approaches outlast the project itself.