Claudius Siebel got in touch with the topic of lobbying during a pilot training course in the German Federal State of Rhineland-Paletinate. The course required youth workers to explore the topic of lobbying and engage directly in a lobbying action. Inspired by this, two European long-term Training courses on lobbying for youth work were realised. These were followed by national trainings in some of the participating countries. For this article we interviewed Claudius Siebel to learn more about this important topic, the course, and the developments that are coming from it.
Let's start with an introduction, who are you and what do you do?
My name is Claudius Siebel. I am a senior advisor at the German National Agency for the Erasmus+ youth programme. For the last couple of years, I have been responsible for two main projects. One is RAY, which is the research project on the EU youth programme and its implementation in Germany. For the other, I am responsible for the Europe Goes Local SNAC (Strategic National Agency Cooperation) and its implementation in Germany. Within Europe Goes Local I have been working on and developing a project on lobbying.
Can you share with us what the lobbying project is about?
I should start by telling you a little bit about the history of this project. It started more than ten years ago in Germany. The main force behind it all was Professor Werner Lindner, he retired last year but he was professor for youth work at the University of Applied Sciences Jena in Eastern Germany. He initiated a project that was called PEP, Practice Development Project. As a result of his teaching experiences, he wrote a book where his main thesis was that youth work and youth workers are far too often suffering from political circumstances – for example, budget cuts. He felt that youth workers are not seeing themselves as co-creators or co-actors in the shaping of political decisions that affect them or the young people they work with.
He wanted to change this, to change the attitude of the youth workers so that they would consider themselves as active players on the local level. But for this, of course, they need more capacities, more qualifications – for example a qualification in lobbying. He initiated the first long-term training course for 25 youth workers from the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. At that time, he got a lot of support from the youth ministry of that state. I was invited to one of the final meetings of this long-term training course. I was so much convinced about this concept and this approach that I knew I had to bring this to the European level.
So, in 2019/2020 we organised the first European long-term training course: Lobbying for Youth Work with five countries involved. We did this with the help of Professor Werner Lindner and his team, and in cooperation with the Flemish National Agency, JINT. We repeated the course in 2022/2023 under the responsibility of JINT. It was also a long-term training course and kept the same title: Lobbying for Youth Work.
Many of the participating countries found these training courses so interesting that they started to organise something similar on their national levels. We will have the fourth edition in Rhineland-Palatinate, and it is also now happening in two other federal states. There is now also a Flemish course, and there have been two pilot courses, one in Italy and one in Latvia.
We are very happy about this because the topic of lobbying is becoming more and more relevant and important, especially looking at the political circumstances we are facing across Europe.
What are some of the main elements of the course?
It was clear from the beginning that this course should be a very practical course. The participants are expected to run their own very concrete lobbying project throughout the duration of the course. The theoretical part has three core topic areas; networking, communications and political analysis. We had a professor who specialises in networking and network analysis and another who is a communications expert and who also worked as a journalist. In lobbying it is vital to know and understand who the stakeholders are that influence politics in your local surrounding and it is important to know how to talk, how to convince, how to argue, how to find the right arguments, and how to place them.
Can you share an example of a lobbying project from the participants?
One Flemish youth worker is working for a small municipality. She was working alone and isolated as a youth worker and saw that she did not have enough resources for her work. Her lobbying project was just simply and very concretely about getting a second full time youth worker in this municipality. She was very successful. She involved the local youth council by forming an alliance with them and together they lobbied the municipality. She succeeded and the municipality of 20,000 inhabitants agreed to finance a second youth worker.
Most of the lobbying projects done by the participants are about staff resources, money or stopping budget cuts. However, occasionally there are other examples, there was one about strengthening international youth work in the local youth work policy plan. This is very relevant for us as National Agencies, because we are mostly promoting European or international youth work.
Something else to keep in mind about lobbying is that many of the concrete lobbying projects the youth workers tried, failed. Lobbying is intrinsically an experience of failure. Many simply fail or don’t reach their aim – they reach small parts of the aim but not the whole thing. Lobbying is a very demanding process, it requires a lot of time, resources, and resilience – especially because it comes with many negative experiences. Put simply, many of our youth workers give up their projects or have to adapt them to other needs. Most often the problem is that they lack the time resources because they have their youth work job, and, to do a really good lobbying process is half a job at minimum.
How does this project connect with the European Youth Work Agenda and the eight priority areas?
For me the connection is very evident because it is all about the capacity building of youth workers – quality development. It is also connecting with the strategic framework for youth work development and promotion and recognition.
The most important aspect of the lobbying course is that it changes the attitudes of youth workers. By engaging in the course, they start to see themselves as actors and not only as subjects of certain political developments. Another very important aspect, which was initially highlighted by Professor Lindner, is that youth participation must be a core element of lobbying. Every youth worker has the young people that they work with, it is vital that those young people are involved in the lobbying. This tends to make any lobbying much stronger.
This capacity building is not an end story, it is a process and our strongest recommendation is that we need more trainings on lobbying for youth workers in Europe. We need existing youth worker training formats to add this notion and this aspect of lobbying into their curricula.
What is one of the outcomes from this course?
In March 2026 we organised an expert meeting on lobbying. Because so many courses have happened now, we saw that it is time to evaluate what we are doing. We invited participants from the different courses to come together and to reflect on their experiences. Together, we looked at what they have learned, and reflected on what this course has brought them, and any impact it has had on their local youth policy or youth work policy. We also invited some experts on the topic of lobbying. In total we were 35 people.
When organising the meeting we thought it would be good to be able to show the results of our evaluation and reflection. There are three of us, Geert Boutsen (UCLL University Belgium), Nele Leeten (Jint, Belgium) and myself, coordinating the production of a position paper with many others contributing to the writing. The short paper describes the whole story, the reflections of the participants and some concrete recommendations and conclusions around this topic of lobbying.
You can find the paper here.
