GENESIS OF THE TRAINING:
Youth workers are most prone to social cultural confrontations and conflictual situations in their regular work because they work with very diverse and mostly marginalized communities and are often at the front lines of with youngsters from all backgrounds; yet, pragmatic approaches to address the growing social needs of these youngsters within the current political climate remain dismal. Also, current approaches to cultural and social competency do not adequately equip youth workers to address the complex factors that shape inequality and marginalization within society and do not properly equip them to handle conflict in the daily work. Hence, our training "​Participatory and Emancipatory Approaches for Youth Work" for 30 participants from Austria, Croatia, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Spain with the support of ERASMUS+ of the European Union, aims to provide youth workers with a more comprehensive approach for ensuring culturally and socially competent practices to tackle inequality and marginalisation, while handling possible conflict safely and constructively. In this training, we utilize innovative conflict transformation practices to inform an emancipatory perspective to cultural and social competency that shifts the current discourse to one that questions structures and processes of power instead of accepting them as status quo. We utilize the definition of “emancipatory approach” as one that enhances understanding of how power works to limit opportunities, create marginalization, and perpetuate inequities. Therefore, our emancipatory approach to cultural social competency in youth work is well informed from an understanding and operationalization of critical understanding because critical thinking helps to challenge social inequities by moving beyond what is on the surface to analyze the roots of injustice that cause conflicts. As Kincheloe JL "critical thinking is when people reflect on the discursive practices and power relations present within society in order to disengage from them".​