Consejo de la Juventud de Ciudad Real

The Youth Council of Ciudad Real (Consejoven) is a non-profit organization whose main objective is to represent, give voice and defend the interests of youth entities and youth in general before the different public administrations. Other main goals are: -promote and advise youth associations on the implementation of their activities and their proper functioning, -advocate for youth participation and empowerment through partnerships, volunteering and social entrepreneurship, -work with administrations and other organisations on youth issues. We address our activities mainly to two target groups: -Young people from 12 to 30 -Youth associations Since 1995, we have been working on youth participation at local level, precisely through the associations registered in our organization and the activities that we have been developing in collaboration with them. We developed the "YOUTH PARTICIPATION AND ASSOCIATION PROGRAMME" to achieve this goal. Moreover, since 2015, we have acted as a host organization in ESC projects, as well as worked as a support organization for Erasmus+ projects, as we are convinced that the Erasmus+ program is a vital tool to encourage solidarity and participation between youngsters, through non-formal learning and the organizations offering all those opportunities in different countries. Furthermore, we organized two contact seminars, one in 2015 and the other one in 2019, along with a project on structured dialogue between youngsters and local politicians. In 2019, we also carried out our first International exchange. In the years 2020-2021 we have developed a project about participation and youth empowerment of the KA2 action. Since the ESC and Erasmus+ youth programmes, we have increased our work, with more activities related to youth participation and youth policies. We have also succeeded in: -Motivate young people who thought they had no other opportunities -Manage to create a youth associative net -Encouraging young people to participate in ESC and Erasmus+ projects -Boost European volunteering in the Castilla La-Mancha region Currently, our organization manages multiple volunteer activities, through the youth entities in the local context. To this end, we coordinate more than 60 associations belonging to the Council, informing, advising and guiding them on any issue related to its functioning and especially the development of its activities. With this we achieve a degree of collaboration and integration of entities with each other and the projects are carried out in a more effective way. We are an entity with experience both at local and regional level with our programs participation, as at European level through our voluntary programme. We are offering to our youth community the possibility to understand better the ways of participating at European level with the Erasmus+ Youth programmes, through the youth participation workshops we offer, as part of the collaborative work done by our European volunteers with young people and associations. Thanks to these workshops, several young people from our town were very interested in participating and organizing projects at European level and youth exchanges.