Newsletter (March 2021)

Dear all,

Rural NEET Youth Network has recently launched its first deliverables.

Working Group 1 has developed 14 national reports about the situation of Rural NEETs, in the period between 2009 and 2019. The reports cover the evolution of indicators that are highly important to understand the situation of NEETs, such as youth employment and unemployment, the rate of early school leaving from education or training or the NEETs share. All indicators were compared based on the degree of urbanization criteria, meaning that results are presented for urban areas (cities), suburban areas and towns and rural areas. This sort of comparison helps to better situate rural NEETs needs and challenges within the reality of each country.

Working Group 2 has delivered a manual of intervention best-practices. This manual offers, therefore, valuable contributions for upcoming research efforts within
and beyond our action. These include a complete methodological framework for future case studies, practical tools to conduct field research than can be combined with many different methodological approaches (qualitative, mixed-methods, etc.); and, (c) strategic criteria for conducting research in complex settings such as community-based programs. In addition, this manual sets the necessary conditions to present evidence-based conclusions about programs targeting rural NEETs, further aiding policy-makers to opt for solutions that clearly produce better results.

All deliverables are open and accessible in our website:

  

https://rnyobservatory.eu/web/manual-best-practices-rural-neets/

https://rnyobservatory.eu/web/national-reports-about-rural-neets-2009-2019/

On the 27th of January, Rural NEET Youth Network hosted its first online conference intitled “Education: What’s next? Formal education and training and the transition from school to work in rural areas”. This was supposed to be a face-to-face conference in Lisbon, to be held in October 2020, but the pandemic situation did not allow us to move forward with our plans.

Here are some results on the impact of the conference:

If you could not attend and wish to watch some of the sessions, please log on to our Faceboook page, were you can find the recorded sessions:

https://rnyobservatory.eu/web/lisbon-conference-2021/

Rural NEET Youth Network is launching this year calls for mentors and mentees for a mentoring program. The mentoring program aims to support Early Career Investigators (ECI), i.e. researchers up to 8 years after their PhD completion) as well as PhD students in developing research proposals on rural NEETs related topics. The mentoring scheme is intended to contribute, therefore, to develop and retain productive, professional researchers, who can reach out to the rural areas and capture the needs of youth and their specific risks and opportunities in these regions. As such, the primary focus of the program is mentoring  young researchers, supporting them in the preparation of multidisciplinary research projects, by developing their interest for relevant rural topics. The focus of the program is to build upon group and peer-to-peer mentoring mechanisms. The action members will be involved in the mentoring program, to make sure that the work group results feed into the mentoring scheme, while profiting from their knowledge and experience to develop the research topics.

The program will be held between January and December 2022, including face-to-face and online events.

Do you want to become a mentor? Do you have an idea for research and need a senior researcher to help you develop your idea? Please keep tuned in, as our calls will be coming up very soon!

For any questions that you might have on this issue, please contact Bahanur Nasya (AUT), the program coordinator: office@wonderland.cx.