Future Me: Equipping Youth Workers and Young People with Skills for the Future

Future Me is a two-year Erasmus+ cooperation project designed to enhance the capacity of youth workers and empower young people across Europe with the skills and mindset needed to thrive in a rapidly changing world. By focusing on future-readiness, resilience, and digital adaptability, the project promotes innovation and quality in youth work.

The project is led by Gemeinsam leben und lernen in Europa e.V. (Germany) and implemented in partnership with Backslash (Spain), Centrul de Voluntariat Cluj-Napoca (Romania), and Associazione Joint (Italy). The consortium was founded on established, trusted partnerships built through the previous Erasmus+ project Entrepreneur+. This collaboration provided a strong foundation of mutual trust, shared values, and proven reliability. The partnership was strategically formed to ensure geographical, cultural, and methodological diversity, making the project adaptable and impactful across different European contexts.

• Youth Workers, professionals and volunteers working in youth services, education, community work, etc.
• Young People, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds (e.g., NEETs, migrants, rural youth, LGBTQ+, etc.)
• Youth Organisations, looking to improve their training offer and future-readiness strategies

Young people face increasing uncertainty due to climate change, automation, and global instability. Youth workers need new tools to prepare them not just for jobs: but for life. Future Me responds to this need with a structured, transnational training solution.

The project addresses the evolving challenges young people face today by focusing on five key objectives:

1. Enhance the quality and innovation of youth work through comprehensive training on “Skills for the Future.”
2. Support the professional development of youth workers in areas such as critical thinking, emotional resilience, digital competence, and future thinking.
3. Strengthen the capacity of youth workers to mentor and guide young people in navigating their personal and professional futures.
4. Establish Future Me as a recognised, high-quality training programme within youth organisations across Europe.
5. Empower young people, especially those from diverse or marginalised backgrounds, with future-ready life and career skills.

To meet these objectives, the project is structured around three main areas of activity:

1. Curriculum Development – Development of two modular training programmes, one for youth workers and one for young people, covering 13 core future skills including adaptability, resilience, leadership, and problem-solving.
2. Training and Pilot Testing
   • A six-day international training course to test the in-person curriculum.
   • A “train-the-trainer” component to prepare youth workers to deliver these skills to young people.
   • National-level pilot training sessions in each partner country.
3. Digitalisation and Online Learning Platform
   • Transformation of the training into a self-paced, interactive eLearning course, hosted on a multilingual Learning Management System (LMS).
   • Pilot testing with 100 youth workers across Europe to optimise usability and content quality.

Future Me (project number 2024-2-DE04-KA220-YOU-000287434) is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, under Key Action 2 – Cooperation Partnerships in Youth, with a total project budget of €250,000.

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