Youth@Work

Bridges Youth Work and Volunteering Flagship Conference 

The Youth@Work Bridging Conference aims to be a big meeting point for all the passionate professionals that believe that youth work and volunteering create opportunities for the personal and professional development of young people.

This conference is organised by the Youth@Work Partnership. It will be the flagship event of the partnership  in 2022 and it has 4 main goals:

The Youth@Work Bridging Conference will be an important moment for networking – a constant element during the whole event. The conference aims to be a big meeting point for all the passionate professionals that believe that youth work and volunteering create opportunities for the personal and professional development of young people. Following the core values of the Youth@Work Partnership, the event will bring together representatives of the three main sectors that make our society grow: business, public and third sectors. Volunteering will be in the limelight of the conference, especially its contribution to the personal and professional development of young people.

Participant report

"In the last days of the summer, I applied for the next event of the Youth@Work Partnership, a 3-day conference in the Turkish capital Ankara, which focused on the relationship between volunteering and employability. I consider self-learning important, so I try to participate in at least one such event every year, and as I was the last of the founders of the Youth Bridges Budapest who not have attended a Youth@Work event so far, I felt I should definitely fill this gap 😊

I could relate to the topic of the conference in several ways. Most importantly, volunteering has contributed to my career a lot. Although I had a good job in my early twenties, it was not fulfilling professionally, and I developed the curiosity for the change during the three months I spent in India. Ultimately, in some extent this led to the founding of Youth Bridges Budapest, and since then I have had many opportunities to grow: most recently, just this spring, I was able to participate in a 5-week internship in the United States on entrepreneurship development.

My international adventures and development also caught the attention of the conference organisers, who invited me to share my story with my Italian, Bulgarian and Flemish colleagues in the 'Learning Islands' workshop. After the session, I received a lot of positive feedback from the participants, and it became even easier to make contacts.

This was the main motivation for me to attend the conference and, fortunately, also its greatest strength: the friendly, open, yet professional atmosphere, which allowed effective networking. I contacted several NGOs with whom we will try to build partnerships in the future. Furthermore, these few days have also provided us with new good practices, for example, we will be able to incorporate the 4M storytelling method into one of our projects.

The Youth@Work Bridges Youth Work and Volunteering Flagship Conference was full of exciting presentations, workshops, networking opportunities and on the last day we even had the chance to have a look around Ankara Castle. We were also able to witness the first Youth@Work Awards ceremony, which I hope will become a tradition, because humorous yet appreciative events like this are much needed in the youth sector. "

Csenge Kolozsvári

Date: 18-22 October 2022

Participating countries: Youth in Action Programme countries , Partner Countries Neighbouring the EU

We were represented by one of our co-founders on the conference.