Strengthening local communities to respond to rural youth needs

The needs of young people in rural areas are not only individual or generational problems. They reveal how a community works, distributes opportunities and includes or excludes its younger members. 

To respond effectively, we need an ecological and community-based perspective. Young people do not live in isolation. They grow within families, schools, institutions, social networks, labour markets, services and cultural narratives. For this reason, individual well-being and community well-being are deeply connected.

Designing policy with rural youth

This perspective is consistent with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development recommendations for open, inclusive and participatory public policies. Effective policies should not only provide services from above. They should strengthen institutional accountability, support civic capacities and involve the people directly affected by social problems. This means designing policies with young people and local communities, not only for them.

Rural youth often face structural barriers: limited transport, fewer services, inadequate educational opportunities, unstable employment, poor digital connectivity and few spaces for participation. When access to education, work, healthcare, culture and mobility depends too strongly on where a person is born, territorial inequality becomes biographical inequality.

For this reason, rural youth policies should address the conditions that make participation, education, work and belonging possible. This means investing in transport, digital infrastructure, cultural spaces, local organisations, education and employment services, while supporting community-based actors over time.

The importance of participation

A first essential issue is youth participation. Participation does not only mean voting or taking part in public life. It also means involving young people in decisions that affect them, recognising their knowledge and allowing them to help design, implement and evaluate responses. Many young people, especially in marginalised rural areas, feel unheard by institutions. This can create mistrust, disengagement and isolation.

Here it is important to connect participation with the idea of ‘mattering’: that is, feeling valued and able to add value. It is not only having a voice but experiencing that one's voice counts. This links dignity, recognition and agency. Its opposite, ‘anti-mattering’, makes young people feel invisible or irrelevant and weakens the future of the whole community.

This is why participation should not be reduced to occasional consultation. Asking young people for their opinions after decisions have already been made is not enough. Participation becomes meaningful when young people help define problems, imagine responses and share responsibility for change.

A rights-based perspective

A second essential issue is a youth rights-based perspective. Young people are not only vulnerable subjects, beneficiaries or future adults. They are rights-holders in the present. They have the right to be heard, to access opportunities, to participate and to shape their futures.

In rural areas, this right is connected to the possibility of choosing whether to stay, leave or return. Staying should not mean being trapped. Leaving should not be the only route to education, employment or recognition. The concept of restanza, developed by Vito Teti, helps explain this point: it describes a way of remaining that is active, critical and future-oriented. It is not nostalgia or passive attachment to place. It means staying while helping to regenerate a place.

This idea moves us beyond a simple opposition between staying and leaving. Some young people leave because they want to explore new possibilities; others leave because they feel forced to do so. Some stay because they see value and opportunities in their territory; others stay because they lack the resources to move. 

From this perspective, both mobility and staying should be understood as capabilities. The real issue is whether young people have the freedom to choose where and how to live. Good rural policies should expand this freedom: to leave without being forced to leave, and to stay without being trapped.

A space for dialogue

The DM Community Table offers a concrete example. Created in 2017 in a rural, mountain area of northern Italy, it became a permanent space for dialogue among social workers, teachers, local administrators, third sector organisations, volunteers and university researchers. Its aim was to understand young people's needs, strengthen belonging and promote well-being. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it developed participatory action research on adolescents’ sense of community belonging, well-being and future perspectives. Its most important result was not only the research, but also the involvement of adolescents and young people and a way of understanding them as active subjects, capable of contributing to knowledge, relationships, trust, shared language and collaborative capacity.

In conclusion, responding to rural youth needs means moving from interventions for young people to processes with young people. Rural areas should be places where young people can choose, contribute and live with dignity. Strengthening communities means giving hope a real setting: places, relationships, institutions and policies that allow young people to matter and to build their futures.

Author: Elena Marta, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milano-Brescia and President of the General Assembly of EURYO

Explore the latest Rural Pact resources on youth and join the Community Group to connect and exchange with peers.