From barriers to concrete pilot ideas

Our second day in Vienna was all about co-creating the COOPOWER pilots, moving from concepts to the first concrete building blocks.

Throughout the day, ZSI facilitated an interactive workshop where partners jointly explored:

Who’s involved?

We mapped key stakeholders and target groups in each pilot region, from primary school pupils in small Slovak villages and high-school students in Romania, to long-term unemployed youth in Serbia, young people in the Tokaj wine region in Hungary, coastal communities in Bulgaria, and rural youth in Ukraine.

What’s in the way?

We looked at obstacles in working with businesses, civil society, education and public authorities:

• missing or underfunded NGOs;

• low motivation and distrust among young people;

• burned-out teachers and limited local infrastructure;

• institutional silos and competing projects.

Together we collected strategies to shift from competition to cooperation, build trust, and create truly low-threshold access.

What does engagement really mean?

Building on HETFA’s input on evaluation, we discussed different levels of engagement, from simply reaching young people to involving them as co-creators, and how to capture not just participation numbers, but meaningful change.

What motivates young people to join and stay?

In the afternoon, Jugendinitiative Triestingtal shared its experience of working with rural youth: why voluntary participation, second chances, safe spaces, and realistic incentives matter when you want engagement that lasts.

We closed the day with a creative session on pilot actions, where each country team started shaping its own pilot concept and sketched first ideas for shared principles, tools and incentive models. These drafts were further refined and presented on Day 3, feeding into the joint COOPOWER pilot implementation framework.

Staying close to local realities, while building something shared across the Danube Region, that’s what Day 2 was all about.