Alina Aydin is 18 years old and is a 12th grade student at Sculeni High School. For more than a year she has been an active member of the Ungheni District Youth Centre. To get to Ungheni, she travels more than 20 kilometres one way by minibus, but says the activities there are worth the effort.

But for several months now, Alina and other young people like her no longer have to go to Ungheni for activities, as they have the opportunity to meet in their own village in a youth space. The local youth centre in Sculeni was created in an adjoining buildings of the high school that had been deserted for years, and has now become an attractive space, with furniture and equipment, where young people gather, discuss, have fun and learn new things. What's more, it is not only young people from Sculeni that come here, but also from other neighbouring villages.

Thanks to the Mobile Youth Work Program, for which the Ungheni Youth Centre was selected together with ten other youth centres from the country, the Centre's mobile team can organise training activities for young people to become more active and civically involved in their community.  The program is carried out in partnership with the Moldova Youth Centres Network and is financially supported by UNFPA Moldova jointly with the Ministry of Education and Research and the Swiss Cooperation Office. This program ran throughout 2022 with the aim of involving young people from rural areas in civic activities and supporting their projects and initiatives.

Alina together with her group of colleagues from the village of Sculeni became one of over 2000 young men and women who had this opportunity. Supported by the mobile team of the Ungheni Youth Centre, the young people came up with the initiative to create a local youth centre in Sculeni and they succeeded in realising this idea. The mobile team from Ungheni, made up of youth workers from the Centre and young volunteers from the district, came to visit them, carried out training activities for the local team, so that they could get involved in local community mobilisation and development initiatives.

‘It is a very good opportunity for young people from the villages to participate in the activities of the District Youth Centre, as well as to be supported to put their own ideas into practice,’ says Alina. She is confident that all the knowledge she has gained from the activities at the Youth Centre will serve her well in her adult life, especially in her future profession – she dreams of a career in international relations.

The 11 youth centres participating in the program were supported in orgasnising the mobile youth work, the final aim of these actions being to include as many young people as possible from all over the country, so that they can benefit from training and educational activities. Each selected youth centre was encouraged to organise at least 10 mobile youth work activities to reach at least 200 young participants, boys and girls from remote and low-opportunity areas.

In total, more than 2000 young men and women had the opportunity to get involved and participate in youth activities.

The Ungheni Youth Centre was established in 2018 and currently provides a wide variety of services, with a large community of volunteers from different communities, including the municipality of Ungheni. The centre organises leisure time activities for young people and the centre's professionals run various workshops for young people, including on healthy living. At the same time, the Centre implements various projects with the involvement and participation of young people.

The Ungheni Youth Centre, together with 44 other centres, is part of the Moldova Youth Centres Network, jointly supported and developed by the Ministry of Education and Research of the Republic of Moldova, the Swiss Cooperation Office and UNFPA Moldova.