YCARe is a unique international project aimed at supporting youth counsellors in preventing and combatting radicalization between youths. The projects aim is to build professional capacity of first line practitioners and to foster empowerment, participation, and active citizenship of young people. The partnership provides an online learning platform for counsellors in which guidelines, material and best practices can be found in one place and used in practice.
In the past few years, radicalization towards violent extremist and terrorist positions is considered an increasing threat in the European Union. Because of increase of young people, who participate or sympathize with extremist groups and other forms of violence and intolerance (e.g. juvenile gangs, xenophobia, islamophobia etc.), radicalization has become a priority and a challenge on the political agenda. Therefore Y-care project is aimed for youth counsellors, who are in direct contact with individuals at risk or vulnerable groups in society.
For the purposes of additional professional training the partnership has prepared an educational set, which consisting of handbook, online platform, and mobile application. For anti-radical oriented counselling in practice is available toolbox. The handbook provides information about process of radicalisation. Attention is mostly paid to early detection and to intervention and exit strategies in later stages. The guidelines in handbook are linked with the toolbox. A toolbox consists of three separated boxes. In the first box are training materials in the form of exercises for immediate use in educational context. The second box stores good practices. They serve as a source of inspiration for further development of counter-radicalisation programs in countries all over Europe. The third box consist of awareness raising multimedia tools and promotional materials.
With the creation of the online learning platform partnership provide self-learning programme, which is available for free for teachers and counsellors all over the world.
More information is available on the project website.