Brief
History
In 1999 YSI’s Executive Director, Richard Harrill,
was hired as a consult to the Ford
Foundation to research and write country profiles
on youth service in Poland and Hungary. These accompanied
a profile on youth service in Russia, forming the Central
and Eastern European snapshot in Ford’s
Worldwide Workshop on Youth Involvement as a Strategy
for Social, Economic and Democratic Development.
Traveling around these countries to conduct interviews
with dozens of youth experts enabled YSI to construct
a detailed map of the resources and key stakeholders
in the nascent youth service movements emerging in the
region in the late 1990s.
In 2001 YSI applied for and received a planning grant
from the Ford Foundation to assess the "Prospects
for Trilateral Cooperation between Hungary, Poland and
Russia on Youth Service and Volunteerism."
This assessment emphasized cooperation across
sectors and disciplines within countries, as well as
cross-border cooperation between youth NGOs, trainers,
policy researchers, education experts and the donor
community.
In the spring of 2002, the Open Society Institute
sponsored a meeting in Budapest of the key stakeholders
from each country, about 50 in all, enabling these Poles,
Russians and Hungarians to meet one another for the
first time, and map out the prospects for future cooperation.
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