Youth associations and cooperatives: getting young people into work
This report seeks to understand how collective action can help address the challenges that young people cannot overcome individually.
The overarching question discussed here
is how collective action can help address the
challenges that young people cannot overcome
individually. Young people occupy a unique
position by virtue of being in transition from
childhood to adulthood. This means that
they can no longer rely on their parents to
support them, but nor do they have the social,
economic and political resources associated
with adulthood. There is a long history of
collective action in rural communities with
the aim of providing excluded groups with the
networks necessary to access such resources.
However, their application to youth employment
challenges and the specific forms of exclusion
experienced by young people is comparatively
new. This report seeks to understand their
operation in such contexts. It also looks in depth
at the ways in which collective action can help to
address young people’s exclusion from financial
services and how they can build realistic and
actionable aspirations.