PEACE4EUROPE

News!

The PEACE4Europe project has published a new guide, Youth Worker as a Peace Educator, to support youth workers in integrating peace education into their everyday practice. The guide is freely available and can be accessed here.

Below, you will find more information about the project and the guide in all available language versions.

PEACE4Europe is an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership project that strengthens the role of peace education in European youth work. The project is coordinated bySouth-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (Xamk, Finland) and implemented in partnership with the Peace Education Institute (Rauhankasvatusinstituutti, Finland), BEST Institut für berufsbezogene Weiterbildung und Personaltraining GmbH (Austria), GYIÖT Gyermek- és Ifjúsági Önkormányzati Társaság (Hungary), MONDO (Estonia), and ENK – Estonian Association of Youth Workers (Eesti Noorsootöötajate Kogu, Estonia). The project brings together partner organisations from Finland, Estonia, Austria and Hungary to explore how peace education can be meaningfully integrated into non-formal learning and everyday youth work.

The project aims to increase youth workers’ understanding of peace education and to equip them with practical methods, tools and confidence to act as peace educators in their communities. Rather than treating peace education as a separate topic, PEACE4Europe highlights how its principles – such as dialogue, inclusion, empathy, human rights, democratic participation and constructive conflict resolution – are already closely connected to high-quality youth work.

A central part of the project has been a series of dialogue workshops organised in all partner countries. Youth workers reflected on the current challenges they face, including increasing societal polarisation, misinformation, discrimination and conflicts affecting young people’s everyday lives. At the same time, they identified numerous good practices already used in youth work that foster trust, respectful dialogue, participation and peaceful interaction.

PEACE4Europe contributes to a broader understanding of peace education as an essential competence for today’s youth work and as a practical approach to promoting social cohesion, active citizenship and sustainable peace in Europe.

Building on these findings, the project has developed an international educational resource, which offers practical guidance, methods and inspiring examples for integrating peace education into non-formal learning. The materials support youth workers and organisations across Europe in strengthening young people’s democratic competences, resilience and ability to build peaceful, inclusive communities.

The project’s main output, the Youth Worker as a Peace Educator guide, has been published in English as well as in the national languages of all partner countries (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and German). You can access all language versions using the links below.