Ural Federal University: Sociologists Figure Out Ways to Involve Youth in Sociocultural Urban Projects

The research group from Ural Federal University is among the winners of the Expert Institute for Social Research’s competition. The scientists will receive a grant to implement the project “Overcoming Youth Non-Participation in Volunteer Activities as a Means of Forming Public Consent in the Development of Urban Culture”.

“On the one hand, we are engaged in expanding theory about youth participation in general. On the other hand, we are solving practical problems for the nonprofit sector and public authorities of our region. As part of the project, we will try to answer the question of why quite a large proportion of young people and girls have experience of volunteering, but do not consider volunteering as part of their life, their personal success, career or leisure time. Thanks to the state policy of promoting volunteering, many people acquire volunteer experience in their school years, evaluate it positively, but consciously refuse to participate in social or cultural projects in the present, do not plan such activity in the near future,” says Maria Pevnaya, Head of the Department of Sociology and Public and Municipal Administration Technologies at UrFU and the manager of the project.

Researchers plan to conduct a survey of young people in the Sverdlovsk Region, as well as a series of qualitative studies. They will find out how the decision not to participate in volunteer activities is related to the subjective personal resources of young people and objective conditions, such as the practice of organizing youth projects. As a result, the researchers will provide a number of management solutions for socially oriented non-profit organizations so that they can build more effective work with young people.