2022 is the European Year of Youth – a year dedicated to honour and support young generations.

The European Commission is fully committed to encourage young people to become active citizens and actors of positive change. To do so, the Interreg Volunteer Youth (IVY) initiative will continue for the next three years.

The Programme encourages our projects to host a volunteer for a period of 2 to 6 months, to help communicate the benefits of territorial cooperation, and receive support in the implementation of projects.

Thanks to IVY initiative, which was started in March, 2017, hundreds of Interreg projects all over Europe have been implemented with the support of young Europeans who brought their interest, skills and enthusiasm. Those who benefited from hosting volunteers range from different bodies who are managing Interreg programmes (Managing and National Authorities, Joint Secretariats) to project partners who are practically implementing projects.

Our Programme has also benefited from this initiative in summer 2018 by hosting in Joint Secretariat young and motivated volunteer Tijmen Kohn from the Netherlands who helped communicating Programme results. Moreover, several of Programme’s projects have benefited from volunteers: Creation of Healthy Lifestyle Network of Basketball Enthusiasts in Venta River Communities in Lithuania and Latvia (LLI-237, BVENTA), Revival of old traditional fruit, vegetable and ornamental plants and their products: Heritage Gardens Tour (LLI-181,  Heritage Gardens), Heritage based agritourism product development in Latvia – Lithuania (LLI-65, AGRIHERITAGE), The adaptation of the Venta river to tourism in the border areas of Lithuania and Latvia (LLI-293, ViVa). Volunteers have supported projects in various phases of their realisation: from planning to implementing, from researching to communicating their results. Interviews have been taken, videos made, events organised to increase the visibility of Interreg and to showcase the results of projects.

We encourage project partners to use this opportunity to get helping hand in implementation of their projects. The project must complete Letter of approval from the Programme and send it to the Head of the Managing Authority for signing (please contact your project manager for this), then complete Project Note. Both documents are available at https://www.interregyouth.com/hostorganisations. There you can also find more detailed description of the process.