The project ResilienceWorks aims to develop approaches for increasing resilience against radicalization for labour market integration programs that aim at young people.

Labor-market-integration programs bring employees in contact with young people that are facing multiple problems. In some cases, these can push young people towards group-related devaluation ideologies or into radical (online or offline) groups. In addition to a basic overview of potential manifestations and forms, it is therefore necessary to identify risk groups at an early stage and to strengthen their resilience against radicalization. Institutions and organizations that implement the programs for labor market integration and work with young people are therefore main stakeholders in this context.

However, early prevention initiatives are largely missing in programs for labor market integration of young people. On the one hand, there hasn’t been a well-founded survey or a quantification of the significance of the problem; on the other hand, approaches or methods of how trainers can improve the resilience of young people who are participating in one of their programs for labor market integration are rare.

ResilienceWorks aims to obtain a more in-depth assessment of the problem of radicalization in core programs for labor market integration of young people (“Education and Training up to 18”), in which around 80,000 young people and young adults participate each year. Based on the results gathered through quantitative and qualitative research, various methods and approaches to increase the resilience of young people against radicalization are conceived, tested and optimized within experimental labs and finally provided as toolkits for practitioners. In addition, the added value of the “ResilienceWorks” project is strengthened through networking and dissemination as well as through the preparation of evidence-based policy recommendations.