The research carried out since March in the consortium countries —Spain, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands— confirms that organisations recognise the importance of professional wellbeing and resilience, but still need to turn this commitment into stable systems for prevention, support and participation.
The European project POSITIVE – Wellbeing & Resilience in Youth Work for Social Change has reached one of the main milestones of its first stage with the completion of two transnational studies on the wellbeing, resilience and mental health of professionals, staff members and volunteers working with young people.
The results provide a shared picture of organisations in Spain, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands and highlight a key issue for the quality of youth work: caring for those who support and accompany young people cannot depend solely on their individual ability to cope with stress, workload or the emotional demands of their work. Professional wellbeing must also become part of organisational responsibility, culture and everyday functioning.
The two reports are the main results achieved so far within the project’s second Work Package and address one of the core objectives on which POSITIVE was founded: to understand how organisations perceive the wellbeing and resilience of their teams and how prepared they are to become positive and supportive environments. The consortium specifically envisaged this research as a starting point for generating organisational change and guiding the development of subsequent project resources and training activities.
From recognition to action: the main conclusion of Study 1
The first report, “Attitudes & beliefs of organisations towards Well-being & Resilience of practitioners in Youth Work”, whose transnational development was led by our organisation, COCEMFE Sevilla, with the support of ACE-ES Romania – Navodari Branch, analyses how organisations understand, value and assume responsibility for the wellbeing of people working with young people.
The research used a mixed-methods approach and gathered 194 questionnaire responses —102 from professionals and youth workers and 92 from leaders and managers—, 13 semi-structured interviews and 4 focus groups involving 36 participants from the four countries. According to the authors, the study should be understood as exploratory and comparative and not as a statistically representative sample of the entire European youth sector.
Its main conclusion is particularly significant: participating organisations widely recognise that the wellbeing of their professionals directly affects the quality, continuity and sustainability of youth work, but this recognition is not yet consistently translated into stable organisational procedures, structures or practices.
The study therefore identifies a gap between the recognition of wellbeing and its operationalisation in organisational practice. In other words, wellbeing is valued, but it is not always integrated into planning and resource allocation; organisations acknowledge that they have a responsibility, yet in practice they may still rely on individuals’ own capacity to cope with difficulties; and the importance of leadership is recognised, although those coordinating teams may themselves be overloaded, insufficiently prepared or lack adequate formal support structures to fulfil this role.
The research also highlights the importance of psychological safety. Being able to express concerns, stress, emotional difficulties or personal limits, and to ask for support without fear of judgement, is an essential condition for making overload visible and enabling organisations to respond appropriately. However, this kind of support still often depends on personal relationships, trust between colleagues or the sensitivity of individual managers, rather than being embedded in consolidated organisational mechanisms.
Another key issue is organisations’ ability to turn listening into real change. Teams value reflection and the exchange of experiences, but the study finds that mechanisms for translating this information into decision-making aimed at improving working conditions, or into the review of organisational practices in order to implement concrete changes, remain uneven.
Finally, the study points towards an increasingly systemic understanding of professional wellbeing, which cannot be explained solely through individual coping capacities. Factors such as workload, funding stability, staffing levels, leadership, supervision, communication, team culture and professional recognition significantly influence the wellbeing of those who work with young people. However, this systemic perspective is not yet fully consolidated, and many organisations still need tools, shared language and realistic routines to translate it into practice.
In short, the main conclusion is that organisations already have many of the values needed to begin this shift in approach, but they still need to strengthen their organisational structures.
The second study, “Ready for positive & supportive organizations for practitioners in Youth Work?”, developed by ACE-ES Romania – Navodari Branch and SOWA, goes one step further by analysing how prepared organisations actually are to provide positive and supportive working environments.
This research gathered 203 questionnaire responses —105 from professionals and youth workers and 98 from leaders and managers—, 12 interviews and 4 focus groups. Participants assessed 17 organisational capacities grouped into five main dimensions: leadership, supervision and professional development; organisational culture, inclusion and psychological safety; wellbeing, mental health and burnout prevention; communication, participation and interpersonal support; and organisational resources, systems and adaptability.
The results once again reveal a common pattern across the four countries: all of the capacities analysed are considered more important than they are currently implemented in practice. There is therefore a clear gap between the importance organisations attribute to these capacities and their actual level of development. Organisations appear to understand what a positive and supportive working environment requires, but they have not yet sufficiently developed the systems needed to guarantee it in practice.
The main shared strength lies in organisational culture, inclusion and psychological safety, where participants report a positive sense of respect and belonging. By contrast, the area showing the greatest need for development is precisely wellbeing, mental health and burnout prevention, particularly regarding fair workload distribution and access to mental-health support resources.
The research also identifies other recurring challenges: increasing the meaningful participation of professionals and volunteers in decisions affecting their work, ensuring that feedback and proposals gathered within teams lead to visible changes, and improving recognition of their contributions.
The results therefore point to organisations with a high level of awareness and commitment to positive values, as well as internal relationships that provide a strong foundation, but with an uneven level of structural readiness. For this reason, positive factors already present within teams —such as solidarity, empathy and support between colleagues— should not have to replace stable organisational systems for supervision, prevention, participation and professional support.
From diagnosis to a practical tool for organisations
One particularly relevant outcome of the second study is the inclusion of an organisational self-analysis tool designed to translate the research findings into practice.
This tool enables organisations working with young people to periodically assess their situation across the same five dimensions examined by POSITIVE, identify strengths and areas for improvement, and create internal conversations around leadership, psychological safety, mental health, participation, resources and sustainability.
It is designed as a tool for organisational reflection and learning that can be used, for example, in strategic planning processes, team meetings or regular reviews. In this way, the research does not simply describe a reality, but provides a basis for each organisation to ask itself what it is doing well, where the greatest risks lie and what changes it can introduce to better support its teams.
Caring for those who work with young people also means improving youth work
Both studies converge around an idea that will shape the next stages of POSITIVE: professional wellbeing should not be considered an optional extra or be reduced to individual self-care; it should instead be understood as a condition for sustainable, inclusive and high-quality youth work.
The lines of action emerging from the research include the need to adopt a preventive approach to burnout, review workloads, establish spaces for supervision and reflective practice, strengthen leadership capacities, promote participation in decision-making, consolidate psychologically safe environments and turn team feedback into concrete organisational improvements.
The reports also warn that structural factors —such as unstable funding, project-based work, staff shortages or administrative pressure— may limit organisations’ ability to sustain these practices. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to ask professionals and organisations to become “more resilient”, but to move towards systems that make support sustainable and reduce dependence on individual goodwill.
The results of both studies will now provide the foundation for the next phases of POSITIVE, which include the development of digital cards based on the four pillars of resilience, a resource kit on emotional intelligence and mental health, a digital storybook based on real experiences, and different resources and training programmes for professionals and organisations. In this way, POSITIVE will move from diagnosis towards the creation of practical solutions built around the needs identified during the research.
About POSITIVE
POSITIVE – Wellbeing & Resilience in Youth Work for Social Change is an Erasmus+ KA220-YOU project running from October 2025 to September 2027. It is coordinated by SOWA (Poland) and involves ACE-ES Romania – Navodari Branch and Fundatia Zamolxes, from Romania; COCEMFE Sevilla, from Spain; and Stichting Network and Learning Opportunities, from the Netherlands.
Its aim is to foster knowledge and innovative practices related to the resilience, mental health and wellbeing of people working with young people, particularly in contexts of vulnerability, based on the understanding that caring for those who carry out this work is also a way to improve inclusion, participation and the quality of interventions aimed at young people.
The project is co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ Programme.
More information about POSITIVE: programas@cocemfesevilla.es
