Future workshop greetings from the Danish team

During spring 2024, The Future of Nordic Youth in Rural Regions team conducted workshops with young people settled in rural regions across the north. The overall purpose of the workshops was to investigate how this group envisions possible and (especially) preferable futures within their regions (Read more about the workshops here). The aim of the study was to capture similarities and differences across the different groups and nations. Right now, we are in the process of reading through- and analyzing our material and our report with the results will be published later.

Last week, the Danish team were lucky to be a part of the annual Youth Meeting (in Danish Ungdomsfolkemøde) held at Odsherred Campus in Denmark. The purpose of the Youth Meeting was to gather the local students at the age of 15-19 and have them participate in workshops and talks arranged by various stakeholders.

As some of the older students had participated in the previous workshops, we thought it was a great opportunity to return to Odsherred and present new students to our preliminary findings. In the new format, we brought quotes from the previous workshops, so the students could discuss and validate them. Also, we asked the students to work with three themes that are very present in the existing data – Spare time, Nature and Transport.

Besides showcasing some existing quotes, we also tested a few new methods to explore if the future thinking could be stretched to a new level.

We did this because we discovered it could be a challenge to envision the future in the first workshops. One specific tool that we utilized was the rural trend cards from the RURILIZATION Project (These cards are not a part of this research project). We chose different trends and asked the young people to reflect upon the trend in relation to their theme and how it could affect the possibilities in the future.

It was a pleasure to be back in Odsherred and get some feedback on the data we had collected. Besides this, it was exciting to explore how our data could be applied in a workshop setting to spark new ideas within local rural communities.

Written by Julie Bregenov Jönsson, Rockwool Foundation