CLab visit to Hungary Rooted Locally, Connected Across Europe — Job Shadowing with Egyesek As part of APERO – Alliance for Participation, Empowerment, and Resilient Organizations, CitizensLab member and collaborator Maxsim spent six days job shadowing Egyesek, a Hungarian youth organisation combining long-term local youth work with international volunteering, non-formal education and capacity-building. Two offices, one organisation Szécsény is a small town in Nógrád County, around 90 kilometres north of Budapest, close to the Slovak border. It is not the kind of place that usually appears on European civil-society maps. And that is partly what made it important for us to go there. As part of APERO – Alliance for Participation, Empowerment, and Resilient Organizations, CitizensLab member and collaborator Maxsim spent six days job shadowing Egyesek, a Hungarian youth organisation combining long-term local youth work with international volunteering, non-formal education and capacity-building. The visit moved between two very different contexts – Szécsény and Budapest – which together revealed how one organisation connects deeply rooted local work with a wider national and European infrastructure. Rooted youth work in Szécsény In Szécsény, Maxsim had the opportunity to observe Egyesek’s outreach youth work up close. The team works regularly in local schools and community spaces, using non-formal education to strengthen communication, initiative, decision-making, language skills and young people’s confidence to act. International volunteers are also part of this local ecosystem. Through the European Solidarity Corps and international workcamps, Egyesek connects a relatively remote rural area with young people and opportunities from across Europe and beyond. The relationship works in both directions: international volunteers contribute locally, while young people from the region gain access to experiences and networks far beyond their immediate surroundings. One of the most tangible expressions of this work is Ifiház, a youth-led community space currently being developed in Szécsény. When Maksim visited, the space was still visibly under construction – bare brick walls and a fresh concrete floor – yet it was already being used. There was something telling in this: the community did not have to wait for the building to be finished before beginning to inhabit it. The development of the physical space and the development of the community are happening together. The organisational infrastructure behind the work The Budapest office revealed another side of Egyesek: the training, coordination and organisational infrastructure that makes its local and international work possible. The exchange explored how Egyesek designs non-formal education and capacity-building programmes for young people and practitioners, including its personal-development and facilitator-training programmes. A central methodology is experiential learning: people learn through doing, reflecting, taking responsibility and making sense of their experience together. Another important learning for CitizensLab was seeing how much Egyesek has invested in its communication and outreach capacity. Social media, visual storytelling, website articles and communication around activities are approached as an organisational function rather than something added at the end of a project. For CitizensLab, this raised useful questions about how we can communicate our own work more consistently and make the learning happening inside projects and communities more visible. Learning in both directions Across the two contexts, the job shadowing opened an exchange around the relationship between local community work and international mobility, youth participation, experiential learning, communication and the design of training programmes for practitioners. CitizensLab also shared its own experience with Communities of Practice, Art of Hosting, participatory facilitation and creating learning spaces with diverse and marginalised communities – exploring what it takes to host a group well and how participatory methodologies can travel between different social and cultural contexts. Perhaps one of the strongest impressions from Egyesek was the combination of very grounded local service with a much wider horizon. The work starts with young people, schools and everyday relationships in a rural region, but connects them to international volunteers, learning opportunities and European networks. The visit left us thinking about what it means to hold hope through infrastructure: through a youth centre that is being built while already being inhabited, through people who return week after week, and through organisational structures that connect a small town in northern Hungary with a much wider world. That is perhaps one of the most valuable things job shadowing can offer: not a model to copy, but another way of seeing what is possible.