Hidden Dimensions

Association Co-Efficient has a wide range of experience/expertise of involvement young people living with disabilities into local and international actions/learning experiences. Inclusion of young people living with disabilities is a main horizontal objective of our daily work, promoting the Independent Living Movement and empowering young people to be more selfsustainable and active citizens along the way. Our experience is that there is little emphasis on involving young people living with disabilities into European mobility schemes; according to data supplied by Hungarian NA a meagre 1,9% of the total number of participants were of special needs in KA105 projects hosted in Hungary in 2019.

Young people living with disabilities are often deprived of community activities and less willing to mobilise which affects their social status and environment on the long run. Educational institutions are trying to integrate these young people with limited success, limitations being inflexible pedagogic framework, lack of qualified experts and lack of proper and barrier-free environment. Thus, youth work seems to be an adequate tool for fostering social inclusion and active citizenship of people living with disabilities.

However - as available statistical data suggests - accessibility of mobility schemes and youth NGOs in general are limited. Why? What key stakeholders – grassroots, youth services, NGOs, NAs, policy makers, networks and resource centers – should do to improve accessibility? Our project seek to find the answer by conducting an empirical research and formulating policy recommendations.

This project would focus on assessing barriers in existing youth work infrastructures – defining barriers as wide as possible. The partnership would work on gathering data, knowledge from professionals working on the field.

ACTIVITIES OF THE PROJECT

1. Kick-off in Hungary – start of the project (3 working days + two travel days)

2. 3 subsequent Transnational meetings- TMs scheduled for major milestones

3. IO1 and IO2: research – survey with 50 organizations/country, actively engaged in youth work and mobility schemes, supplemented by 20 deep interviews conducted with professionals. Output: research paper.

4. IO3 policy recommendation for decision makers and support structures reflecting on the needs of the organizations

5. Dissemination: national conferences organised by each partner to disseminate the results of the research and recommendation.