Introduction

YouthBank is an international, youth-led initiative to engage in community development with young people, aimed at encouraging their empowerment and through grant making. There are YouthBanks operating in over 24 countries worldwide, including Scotland and Romania. I was particularly well placed to conduct a study on YouthBanks in these two European locations, having a very good knowledge of both countries as well as recent experience on a placement with YouthBank Scotland. Part of the remit of the placement was, by drawing on my previous in-depth knowledge of the Romanian language and country, to develop links between the two YouthBanks at national level. Currently in Romania there is no accredited qualification at degree level for youth or community workers, and the term ‘youth work’ has no equivalent in the Romanian language (Mitulescu, 2014). The Romanian Youth Council, the CTR, is a non-governmental organisation established to act for the ‘promotion and protection of youth rights’ in Romania (CTR, 2016). It also seeks to encourage training opportunities in non-formal education. This commitment at a non-governmental level is also evident in recent EU policy: ‘Nonformal education is important to promote social and democratic participation of young people’ (EC, 2015). Within this context, I was curious to explore and illuminate the differences and similarities of YouthBank across these two sites, in a project that encourages the ‘transformative participation’ of young people and the communities in which they live. First suggested by White (1996) and then further by Tisdall (2013), the concept of ‘transformative participation’, in terms of both personal and societal possibilities, was of particular interest to me.

I had experienced ‘transformative participation’ at first hand as an outcome through engagement with a YouthBank project in Scotland and was curious to explore the potential in contrasting contexts that would be provided by my chosen research sites. I have spent, and continue to spend, a considerable amount of time in Romania since the regime change in 1989 and have personally experienced the constraints and controls imposed on young people in particular in this society over the past two decades. I was, therefore, especially interested to have the opportunity to explore to what extent things had changed for the generation that has followed that which I first knew in Romania.