Magic Wand for Street Work is an ongoing collaboration between five organizations from five different countries with the goal of establishing support elements for quality implementation of street work in different local environments across Europe. We also aim to increase the visibility of street work at local, regional, national and international levels, which we recognize as an indispensable element for the further development of the field.

The participating organizations are Zavod Bob (Slovenia), CAI - Conversas Associacao International (Portugal), Beroepsvereniging Kinder - En Jongerenwerkers from (Netherlands), Ceska asociace streetwork, z.s. (Czech Republic) and Udruga za mlade Alfa Albona (Croatia).

In May, 2019, during the fist stage of the project, we held a training workshop in which we got to know each other’s methodologies, practices and trends of street work in our countries. This was also an opportunity to share knowledge and experiences, especially with youth workers from Croatia, who have not yet implemented street work in their country. Throughout the training, organizations became more unified about the concepts of street work and the definitions of some of its common characteristics. Therefore, the content written in The Theoretical Basis of Street-Based Youth Work publication is largely a reflection of the results of our training. During the training, a participatory approach was used to present the realities of street work in each country. This included describing the process and activities we rely on to carry out our work, and reviewing the legal basis and systems that are connected with street work in each country. We also defined the approaches, values, goals and mission, target groups and topics that we address with street work.

Later on in 2019 and 2020, we gathered good practices in implementing street work activities and tested them out in different environments. With the activities we cover topics like team building, communication, discrimination, stigmatization, inclusion, law and justice system, sports, creativity and culture, community, personal development, project work, and collaboration with important stakeholders. In 2021 we published a toolkit Magic Wand: Activities for Street-Based Youth Work. This handbook collects a variety of activities that are suitable specifically for street-based youth work. The selected activities were either developed or modified to become suitable for use in public places and outdoor settings. All of the activities were tested in different contexts around Europe, from where we collected various tips and tricks for their implementation. As such, the handbook offers support to street-based youth workers (street workers) and aims, in the long term, to raise the quality of street-based youth work.

As the last step, we developed the didactic tool, this web app where street workers can filter and find activities to implement on the street.

Magic Wand for Street Work was financed by Erasmus+.