What does youth work need to move forward in times of uncertainty? For four days in May 2026, almost 200 stakeholders in European youth work, policy and research tried to answer that question together – and discovered that the better question may be who do we need to be. The gathering From 5 to 8…
Peter Merry, evolutionary leadership expert and long-time companion of the European youth field, started his speech with a word: hyper-complex. He traced it back to a 2012 IBM study where thousands of CEOs were asked what challenges they were facing. The word they came up with, hyper-complexity, was an admission that they no longer knew…
Prof. Dr. Özgehan Şenyuva (Middle East Technical University, Ankara) walked onto the stage with a confession: he is not a sociologist. He is a political scientist who used to be a youth worker and is now, depending on the room, asked to give shorter and shorter keynotes. The room laughed – not just at the…
Research from Wales found that for children who have experienced significant adversity such as abuse, neglect, household instability, consistent access to a single trusted adult reduced poor health outcomes from 59.8% to 21.3%. So, not a programme, not a policy but one person who showed up, reliably, regularly, over time. Science caught up with practice,…