Following the COST Action Rural NEET Youth Network that paved the way for EURYO, our community was recently awarded a COST Innovators Grant (CIG).  A CIG is “an initiative that aims to build bridges between research and take-up at market, product, service, or societal level. CIGs aim to enhance the pace and success of research breakthroughs and as such, offers ending Actions the possibility to create additional impact during the year after the end of the Action”.

Our community proposed to develop the Future Youth Information for Rural Areas (FYI-R). The FYI-R is a strategic foresight toolbox for anticipating rural young people’s needs and perspectives, co-developed with all stakeholders across 16 European countries. The toolbox constitutes an integral component of the European Rural Youth Observatory. We see it as a hybrid instrument combining a national foresight hub, a permanent web-based survey, visual foresight displays and tailored reporting for end-users. The toolbox development will rely on using COST networking tools for out-reaching key stakeholders who are, often, potential clients, implementing co-production methods, involving top-down and bottom-up approaches – meaning from the decision-making arena to rural young people and their representatives, piloting the FYI-R solution across 16 countries and ensuring the CIG results exploitation across potential clients and the scientific community.

Our CIG will start in November 2024 and will be finishing in October 2025.

The results of this CIG call 2024 can be found here: