Do you remember the Caritas Europa Regional Conference in Tbilisi Georgia last year? The special thing about it was the presence and participation of a lot of young people.

Some 60 young Caritas volunteers and/or staff from member organisations were there to underline the importance of youth participation in Caritas work. The Conference listened to the experiences, realities and expectations of young people in the Caritas Europa network and adopted a set of recommendations for both the national and European levels. This was the first step towards developing Young Caritas in the European region.

Youth work is very much alive in our network. Young volunteers join hands with Caritas, come up with good ideas and get things done in support of the elderly, migrants, homeless people, inmates and other socially deprived or vulnerable people. A good sample of these activities is described in our mapping, the main source of information relating to what Caritas Europa member organisations actually DO in their own countries and abroad and who for. You can look up anything in mapping, not only Caritas activities, but also information about the organisations themselves, about their staff and volunteers, who their partner organisations are, what their sources of income are or whether they have experts available to  give you a piece of advice…

You can go and visit mapping with the following “visitor” credentials:

• Username: Visitor
• Password: IAmVistor

In 2018, the focus theme for mapping was “youth work” and last December I analysed all the youth work activities that had by then been shared in our mapping. The analysis shows that there are 32 examples of activities by young people shared by eleven Caritas Europa member organisations who, together, can count on a total of around 208,780 young volunteers! The analysis is available on our website. There is of course a lot more youth work going on out there. So, if your own activities are not yet available in mapping, why not share them  there too and make your youth work  visible for all of us to enjoy and learn from?