Call for participants: RAN Y&E WG meeting on ‘Strategic programmes for resilience against extremism and crime in challenged neighbourhoods’, Zagreb 28-29 May 2024

This lunch-to-lunch meeting will take place in Zagreb, Croatia on 28 and 29 May.

28 May: 12.00-17.30

29 May: 09.00-13.00

For our RAN Youth & Education (Y&E) Working Group meeting, we are looking for practitioners working in formal and informal education with young people, in challenged environments, as part of holistic, long-time programmes to improve equal opportunities and build resilience against crime and violent radicalisation. We want to offer them an opportunity to share efforts and best practices from their daily experiences.

Background and aim of this meeting

Young people growing up in deprived areas, under challenging economic circumstances and with fewer opportunities are considered more at risk for engaging in all kinds of deviant behaviour. Such behaviour can range from criminal recruitment to violent radicalisation. The focus within RAN is on the latter, but the reality of youth workers and teachers across Europe is calling for a joint approach in prevention work for young people.

We know from crime prevention and from general youth prevention that there are approaches which are evidence-based and likely to successfully contribute to equal chances and better resilience against both crime and violent radicalisation:

• whole-of-society approach (‘it takes a village to raise a child’);
• systemic working, including families and ‘important others’;
• prevention over intervention;
• investing in social inclusion;
• needs- and strength-based approaches; and
• use of evidence-based interventions.

Developmental crime prevention strategies focus on the pathways to success for youth (therefore avoiding crime and other types of deviant behaviour) and integrate the activities of all stakeholders in programmes or even new systems. Schools and youth work are key players in these evidence-based crime prevention strategies. For the last Y&E Working Group meeting, we want to learn from and build on practitioners’ experiences in such programmes, which aim to improve equal opportunities and build resilience.

Building on: RAN Y&E: Collaboration between youth work and education (Q1, 2021), Tools for post-lockdown resilience building in youth (Q1, 2023), Dealing with ASAGE and attitudes of young people (Q1, 2024).

Questions that will be discussed during the meeting include:

• How can PCVE efforts benefit from the lessons of state-of-the-art youth crime prevention and vice versa?
• Which successful examples exist of holistic paedagogical approaches in deprived neighbourhoods?
• What factors make these approaches successful?
• What is the role of youth and education professionals in these approaches?

How to register?

If you can provide concrete examples from daily practices, or if you are experiencing challenges around this topic. please register here.

We will invite participants based on the information in the registration link. Please note that we can only invite a limited number of participants to this meeting to ensure valuable exchanges and interaction, so participation is not guaranteed. 

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact b [dot] broedersradaradvies [dot] nl (Boy Broeders), c [dot] binnendijkradaradvies [dot] nl (Carlijn Binnendijk) or s [dot] lenosradaradvies [dot] nl (Steven Lenos).