6 Country Reports on Youth Work - Jugendpolitik in Europa

A different picture arises from the interviews with the youth workers in the NGOs. It is not
clear whether young people working in youth NGOs are interested in having youth work
qualified or recognised as a profession. They see this as being important for people working
in the state institutions responsible for youth work. The NGO sector and the people working
there seem to be more interested in the projects they can develop, how to get funding for
them and how to reach as many young people as possible. They are very proud of their
achievements in terms of years working in the area, numbers of young people participating in
their activities, networks created and young peopled trained. They know a lot about local
youth issues, about the situation of youth organisations at local level and the relationship with
local and national authorities for youth. As they are usually certified by different international
institutions, their interest in having youth work certified as a profession at national level is not
particularly high.
The youth workers at the County Youth Departments are, in most cases, the ones interested
in having their position clarified as a profession. As most of them have a long experience in
working with young people, their certification as “professionals” might come a bit too late.
Worker certification and recognition of youth work as a profession will be more important for
future youth workers or young people starting to be involved in youth activities and youth
organisations, as it will give them more professional stability.
With regard to funding of youth activities: the national representatives mentioned that youth
activities and youth policies, in general, do not get a lot of attention and consequently too
little public funding. Young people and policies for youth are promoted and supported, but not
enough or not so much as not to have complaints about it. At the local level, youth workers in
both public institutions and NGOs complained about “under-funding” and also about lack of
staff for activities in the public sector.
A problem regarding youth activities and youth action in Romania was the politicisation of the
field and bad management of funds in the past, things that put youth activities and some
youth institutions in a bad light. As a result, NGOs had little trust in the state institutions and
also difficulty in communicating with them to promote legislation or other important issues. In
short, the problem of state-NGO collaboration in the area of youth activities still exists and it
shows how problematic the relationship is: in some areas and some parts of the country it
works well, in other there are misunderstandings and lack of cooperation and trust. This
would be one of the important issues to be managed differently in the future.
With regard to visibility of the field and activities: especially youth workers, both from public
organisations and NGOs, saw this as an important result of their activities and were eager to
mention that every time they were successful in helping a new organisation to be formed or
bringing one difficult project to an end, seeing the interest and satisfaction of the young
people taking part in the activities and programmes made up for all the difficulties they had to
face in securing money, putting up proposals to different funding bodies, or lack of resources
and sometimes time. They also mentioned the problem that rural young people do not have a
lot of facilities or programmes dedicated to them, opportunities to start voluntary work or be
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