With more than 13,000 members, HSA is currently the largest youth organization in Hungary, with nearly 3,000 volunteer leaders volunteering every week for a better world. On 1 October 2017, the association launched the EFOP-1.3.6-17-2017-00001 project to support youth-raising activities, which was closed on 31th May, this year.

During this period, HSA addressed more than 20,000 young people within the framework of the project. In the project "Prince Imre-plan – closer to each other" which ended in late May, HSA set two main goals: to support the operation of the Scout movement in favor of further improvement of community education and, on the other hand, to disseminate the values of Scouting widely.

One of the main motivations of choosing our goals was to involve children and young people living in disadvantaged areas and disadvantaged people aged between 8 and 25 in learning about the community education and development we represent.

This is why in our programs we have tried not only to organize a good program for the children, but to offer the elements of Scout method itself to the adults dealing with them. We usually collaborated with local social organizations, hoping to achieve long-term results through joint thinking beyond the project, in order to support creating equal opportunities. In order for this to happen, it was essential to strengthening our movement internally, primarily by supporting our volunteer leaders and our organizational departments.

Thanks to the group-mentors-network established during the project, new local groups were formed, our internal communication was modernized, the methodological repository of our movement has been enriched with various publications, tutorials and new pedagogical programs and tools related to existing and new fields. Besides topics closely related to Scouting life (e.g. camping, leadership skills) we paid much attention to child protection: publications, conferences and discussions were held with the help of experts.

Over the past three years, we have reached over 9600 young people under the age of 25 living outside Budapest and Pest county, 14 new local groups have been created in connection with the project; 3 new training methodologies have been completed for child protection, romology, and management – this way the key milestones have been effectively achieved. We have always kept in mind that our successes need to have long-term effects: this way we can benefit from the experience gained during this period after the project is finished. During the integration of the experiences and lessons of more than 200 programs organized over the past years, we can continue our youth-raising work with renewed strength.

Hungarian Scout Association Communication Group