Youth Work Quality Focus

Organizations and institutions working with youth in the Czech Republic and Slovakia are struggling to accurately describe the quality of their activities and their impact; with how to continuously monitor, find specific areas for improvement and to develop them effectively. By struggling to identify the quality of youth work at national level, it is difficult to describe the concrete impact of the youth work activities, which makes it difficult for youth organizations to present and defend their activities clearly, to point out their societal importance, broad impact or to get more easily financial support. Setting up a system that will describe quality in youth work and provide tools to set up quality control systems in organizations working with youth is therefore the main subject of this project. We want youth work organizations to be able to describe what the quality of their activities means for them, to choose what quality criteria they are relevant for them, how to evaluate them and how they will perform this monitoring. Thanks to this process, we will be able to find out on what criteria the involved organizations build the quality of their activities. We plan to use the findings as a basis for building a qualitative framework (criteria and indicators) describing the quality of work with youth in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Such a framework, along with other outcomes of this project (examples of good practice and tips on how to work with quality systems) should help a wider range of organizations set up their own quality measurement systems. We want to motivate as many organizations as possible to continuously work with quality and thus to support the quality of education in youth work in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The objectives of this project are therefore: - To increase the quality and impact of the activities of the organizations involved by setting up and implementing their own quality measurement systems. - To find out on what basis are the quality systems of the involved organizations and how should the national frameworks of quality criteria of youth work in the Czech Republic and Slovakia be set, and lay the foundations of this framework. - Open discussion on quality measurement in youth work in the Czech-Slovak context and motivate other organizations working with youth to get engaged in this process. The project will be directly attended by representatives of three organizations from the Czech Republic and three from Slovakia and the Swedish organization KEKS. In particular, direct employees of these organizations will participate as they have direct contact with their target groups and also have an impact on the management of these organizations. During the project, these organizations will set up their own quality systems to evaluate the quality of their activities pilotly, and then make changes in their organizations that will have a direct impact on the quality of their activities. From this piloting, we will collect data for the main output of this project - a study that includes a description of piloting experience and recommendations for quality framework creation for activities in youth work in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.