YOUMIG partners met for their third partner meeting in Regensburg, Germany, on November 22-23 with a lot on their agenda. Representatives of the partnership were invited to fill the cozy rooms of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), under the direction of IOS director Ulf Brunnbauer. YOUMIG is now in the phase where connections must be made between various types of research and everything is placed on the theoretical framework on youth migration prepared by the partner Vienna University. The final draft of this framework was presented and discussed in Regensburg.

Each of YOUMIG’s seven municipal partners has completed a multi-pronged analysis locally, called the Local Status Quo Analysis. This work has produced over 1,000 pages in 40 different documents which have been circulating among partners for feedback, under the supervision of the work package leading Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, before the meeting. The local analysis was an important milestone in the project in which qualitative and quantitative research methods were both used to describe local phenomena in youth migration in a very focused and up-to-date manner. The results of this analysis will be published early next year.

Meanwhile partners are already thinking about pilot project ideas - Maribor Development Agency, Slovenia and the Institute for Economic Research, Slovenia were the partners involved in developing activities in this respect, starting with a collection of best practices from which partners can choose one to strengthen their own plan’s development. Pilot plans must have a strong connection with the findings of the local status quo analysis, so in this respect, a lot of co-operation was needed between researchers working on different legs of the project. Teams from each YOUMIG country spent time working on the key issues of pilot design, answering the question: what action related to youth migration would best suit my municipality if it was implemented there for a year?

In another “subplot”, our international hard-data researchers are still working scrupulously to deliver very needs-specific datasets called indicators, which is hoped to enrich the way the topic of youth migration is viewed at municipalities in day-to-day work, as well as refine big-picture analysis on the topic. The hosting IOS is in charge of this work package in YOUMIG. Harmonising the datasets to suit needs in seven countries while acknowledging the operational environments of these different municipal administration systems is no easy task. However, linking data collection and use to specific policy areas is one of the important undertakings of this project. Partners are sparing no effort to keep this task on track.

Bringing all the different threads of work packages and activities together was a bit like putting together a puzzle, and partners were asked to do just that in a fun activity requiring close project cooperation skills. The result was a productive and enjoyable meeting for all.

On the evening of November 22 Kerstin Schreyer, MdL, the Representative in charge of integration at the Bavarian Government, gave a lecture to YOUMIG partners and other invited guests at the IOS. Entitled  “Zuwanderung aus Ost-, Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa: Chancen und Herausforderungen für Bayern” (Migration from East-, Centraleast- and Southern Europe: opportunities and challenges for Bayern), this event presented the opportunity of discussing migration-related topics with a policy-maker and politician, which is an important encounter between research and decision-making, a connection that YOUMIG also builds on. After her lecture, Ms Schreyer took questions from the audience and in this way, YOUMIG researchers had the chance to share research viewpoints and details about the project with Ms Schreyer. Details of that event can be read in German here.