Real Stories. Real Practice. Real Impact.

COOPOWER Partner Meeting - Day 1

We opened the first day of the COOPOWER partner meeting in Vienna with a powerful thematic walking tour around Vienna led by Martin from Wiener Nimmerland, a social enterprise offering alternative city tours guided by people with lived experience of homelessness and addiction.

Martin shared his story with honesty, humour, and an emotional depth that immediately grounded our work. At 15, he was living on the streets. In the years that followed, he navigated drug and alcohol addictions, precarious living conditions, daily survival, and the invisible struggles that many vulnerable young people across the Danube Region still face today.

Hearing him speak about broken support systems, the absence of safe adults, the difficulty of “getting out,” and the small turning points that changed his life reminded us exactly why COOPOWER exists.

His journey reflects the realities of the young people we aim to support through our local pilots and intersectoral cooperation models:

unstable environments;
lack of access to opportunities and services;
barriers that no young person should face alone.

Starting our meeting with this city tour was intentional.

Before diving into analyses, frameworks and pilot designs, we wanted to immerse in the lived experience of the types of youth COOPOWER aims to support, to see the city through the eyes of those who have been excluded from it, and to anchor our work in the human stories behind the data.

A heartfelt thank you to Martin and Wiener Nimmerland for showing us Vienna “from another side”, authentic, raw, and deeply meaningful for the COOPOWER mission.

Learning from Austria’s most inspiring youth-support initiatives

After a powerful morning grounded in Martin’s lived experience, our afternoon focused on practice, innovation, and transferable solutions from six Austrian organisations working every day with vulnerable young people.

Each initiative brought a different lens to the same challenge: how to ensure that background, migration history, poverty, disability, or early school difficulties do not define a young person’s future.

We had the chance to explore:

School-based motivation and drop-out prevention, from structured pathways, early identification systems, and case management models presented by m.o.v.e on Youth Coaching
Volunteer-driven mentoring and “eye-level” support, showcased by Sindbad, whose 1:1 mentoring teams build confidence, guide transitions, and strengthen career readiness for young people aged 13-19.
Bridging companies and talent from disadvantaged backgrounds, through buntaž, whose network of role models, mentors and HR experts empowers students directly in schools and builds diversity in companies.
Creativity-, community- and routine-building programmes, such as Hobby Lobby, helping young people discover their strengths outside the traditional school environment.
Labour market orientation and guidance offered by AMS BIZ, providing clear and accessible labour-market pathways for young people.
Street- and youth-work with low-threshold access, as shown by the Tandem programme of Jugendinitiative Triestingtal: their streetworkers and youth-workers offer outreach, support and counselling for young people aged 12-23, a crucial lifeline for those outside formal systems.

Across all presentations, several themes emerged strongly:

consistency matters: stable adults, mentors, and coaches are often the turning point;
early intervention works: reaching young people in school prevents exclusion later;
low-threshold access is essential: multilingual staff, open-door counselling, and flexible formats reduce barriers;
bridges between systems create impact: youth work, education, labour market services, social work and civil society all have a role;
human stories drive change: case studies from all initiatives reminded us that transformation happens one young person at a time.

Starting our project by learning from those already doing the work has been invaluable and a reminder that solutions exist; our task is to adapt, connect, and scale them.