engleski

Youth services during the Covid-19 pandemic – a patchy net in need of investment

The Covid-19 pandemic impacted various areas of young people’s lives, including access to youth services. The lockdown-induced closure or restricted access to the public services meant that young people lost opportunities to seek support and participate in youth or nonformal activities. The youth sector itself went through a transformation, including transition to almost exclusively online activities, reduced financial resources and increased workload. This resulted in reinforced deprivation of young people, especially those with fewer opportunities, who risked being completely left out of the processes and activities important for their (mental) health, non-formal education, employment, social and political participation and leisure-time activities. Insights from the European and national levels showed limited evidence of using recovery funds for alleviating the impact of the pandemic on youth services. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that governments at national, regional and local level urgently address deficits in services to young people. Although there are no direct measures to address disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in the youth sector, many research and policy studies addressed those disruptions and the situation of young people in the changing context. Among those, the most common analysis of the civil society associations’ work focused on practices undertaken by the youth organisations in view of the crisis ; diversifying tools to reach young people, strengthening digital youth work, along with fighting financial instability and shrinking space for civil society. This study aims to fill in the gaps in the body of knowledge on the impact of the pandemic on young people’s access to youth services. Five expert interviews were conducted with the representatives of the European organisations at national, local and European level. They revealed that the pandemic period has been characterised by several new developments for organisations, most notably by a partial change in the profile of service users and major transformations in working methodology. The increasing complexity of access affected primarily those who needed most help from youth workers and those most dependent on their personal relationship with youth workers. State-operated services received more support in their work with young people during the pandemic than services managed by civil society organisations. This reflected most strikingly in maintenance of regular funding for the state-operated services, whilst the civil society sector struggled to sustain at least a share of their pre-pandemic financial resources. Desk research and interviews highlighted practices of the civil and public sector that can be shared to facilitate recovery in the pandemic and post-pandemic periods, including platforms, instruments and guidelines that target improving both the universal service offers and targeted services for disadvantaged and marginalised young people. Sharing practices should be coupled with gathering regular disaggregated data as a basis for policy making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. These elements for youth policy and practice should be mainstreamed, together with developing adequate criteria and indicators of access to services that could enable more efficient practice and comparative insights among the Council of Europe member states.

Covid-19 pandemic ; youth ; youth services ; civil sector ; public sector

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