Association Amica Educa, together with the Ministry of Education and Science of the Tuzla Canton, are partners in the project Mental Well-being in Education for Disadvantaged Youth (MEET project).

The project is applied by the Center for Social Innovation in Vienna, Austria and financed by the Interreg Danube Transnational Program: Co-funded by the European Union.

The MEET project will promote the mental health of (vulnerable) young people in 11 countries: Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Moldavia, Ukraine, Slovenia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In 2019, 10-12% of young people aged 10-19 years in the Danube Region (DR) were affected by mental disorders. Multiple crises (COVID, Ukraine war, Climate) are an increasing threat to young people’s mental health well-being. The global nature of these crises and the shared challenges in the DR call for a transnational approach.

MEET project aims to building capacities for youth mental health promotion in formal and informal educational settings at three different levels:

• At the practice level, MEET will collaboratively develop and pilot inclusive, innovative and youth-centred tools and learning materials for educators, social workers, practitioners and young people at risk themselves.
• At the level of organisations and intermediaries, MEET will bring together key actors of health coalitions, boost their knowledge on mental health and equip them with a methodology on how to cooperate in the future.  
• At the policy level, MEET will develop a transnational strategy and local action plans to integrate mental health in education giving policy makers of all levels guidelines on how to make education policy more inclusive.

MEET’s innovative approach not only targets formal education like schools, but also non-formal educations, like after-work schools, youth NGOs who are key in reaching disadvantaged learners and vulnerable youth. Moreover, it will address different dimension of social inequalities by reaching out, e.g. to young people in rural areas and to Roma people.

As result, the project will help to combat mental health problems among young people, especially among vulnerable groups of young people. In the long term, the MEET outcomes will lead to a reduction in poor school performance and drop-outs, reduce the number of NEETs, enable a better educated workforce and contribute to reduce labor shortages.

The implementation of the project started on January 1, 2024 and will last 30 months.