CAPI Contact Point: Thematic Groups progress update

May has been a busy month for the CAPI (CAP Implementation) Contact Point’s Thematic Group (TG) work, with CAP Strategic Plan (CSP) implementation, youth employment and forest-dominant areas.

Jobs for younger generations in rural Europe have continued to be a focus of the TG on Rural Youth Employment: the Voice of Rural Youth. Outcomes from the first TG meeting were developed further during informal online exchanges where news about relevant activities was shared, including using a Twitter chat. These fed into the TG’s recent second meeting, which explored support programmes and tools that are available at different levels (EU, national, regional, local) to help identify functional youth employment support models suitable for informing relevant policies.

Members of our TG on CAP Strategic Plans: Towards Implementation also progressed their objectives through a second meeting, which built on the first TG meeting findings. The gathering of CSP implementation expertise confirmed key roles played by monitoring committees covering the full CAP and discussed related issues involved with regionalised countries. Future possibilities for peer exchanges and other options for optimising networking across the full CAP were other topics that came to the attention of the TG.

Forestry stakeholders in our TG on Supporting the Needs of Forest-Dominant Rural Areas and Municipalities: Laying the Groundwork for networking under the Forest Strategy will hold their second meeting on 31 May. This will build on the discussions held during the TG’s first meeting and the good practice examples collected from TG members in between meetings. It will focus on how to deliver multi-functional forests in forest-dominant rural areas and municipalities by balancing different needs – economic, social and environmental/climate – including the benefits of working in partnership and how CAP instruments and interventions can help support this.