A personal view by Bob Payne, one of the founders of Eurodesk, and the former Director of Eurodesk Brussels Link
In the late 1980s, European information was very difficult to find in Scotland. There was a real need in the field for European information, which was not being addressed.
I was part of a study visit to Brussels and Strasbourg, which was arranged for six youth workers from Scotland with the objective of tracking down this information.
The study visit was successful! We found a lot of information relevant to young people and made links with many of the providers of this information. However, at the end of the visit (while sitting in the 'Roi d'Espagne' in the Grand Place in Brussels) we recognised that the information which we had found, was, or should have been, publicly available information, which should have been easy to find in Scotland.
After some more discussion, we agreed to propose a project, which we hoped would improve access for the Scottish youth sector to European information. Eurodesk began life in March 1990 as a small regional project (in European terms) to service the youth work field in Scotland.
The basic idea was, of course, very simple - to gather together in one place all the European information relevant to young people and present it in an easily understandable way.
At the end of March 1990, a launch event was held in Edinburgh to present this new service to the youth field. Had you attended the event, you would have been impressed by this comprehensive, new, all-singing, all-dancing, European information service for young people and youth workers. In fact, at that time, there wasn't even a desk - in effect, we launched only the idea! Immediately after the launch we had to start to make Eurodesk a reality.
In the weeks following the launch event and the attendant press attention, Eurodesk received several hundred enquiries relating to European information. Initially, this was very hard work, since not very much of the service was in place then. However, the main benefit of what happened was that the developing service of Eurodesk was shaped by these few hundred questions - they were real questions from real people and indicated very clearly what sort of information people needed to know and how they wanted to receive it.
The early Eurodesk service was clearly shaped by the real needs of the field. This client-orientated approach to information has been an important factor in the continuing development of Eurodesk.
After some months, despite there being no further advertising, the use of the Eurodesk service was growing rapidly. One of the features of this growth was that more than 40% of all enquiries to Eurodesk were from outside Scotland.
In order to cope with the growth of enquiries and to begin to address the geographical distribution of the enquiries and the requests for lectures, presentations and so on, organisations were recruited in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as Eurodesk partners. These partners were to share the workload of the enquiries, and presentations and ensure a UK-wide approach to the provision of European information.
At the project base in Edinburgh, it was imagined as a kind of "Macdonalds" principle - no matter which Macdonalds Restaurant you go to from Dublin to Moscow or Helsinki to Lisbon, they are all the same. In the same way, no matter which Eurodesk you approached, the service (and the answers to enquiries) should be the same. This was essentially a matter of training and quality control in relation to the enquiry answering and the accuracy of the information. Procedures were therefore introduced to deal with this, and over the next three years, the service with its regional outlets continued to develop as we had hoped.
In November 1994, the European Commission, which had been co-funding the Eurodesk development, asked for a presentation of the Eurodesk model to be given to 6 youth ministries from other EU Member States. The result of this meeting was a pilot project to examine the feasibility of whether the Eurodesk model was flexible enough to be developed in other countries.
It was by no means obvious that the model could be immediately implemented in other countries where the information policies and legal structures are different and there are different ministries involved, etc. However, at the end of this project there were seven new national Eurodesks in Denmark, France, Ireland, Luxembourg the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.
The pilot project must have been successful, because, in 1995, the Commission requested the setting up of a European network of Eurodesk services throughout the EU Member States in order to consolidate this service to the youth field.
In 1996, a full time research and co-ordination unit (the Eurodesk Brussels Link) was established in Brussels to support the national partners in providing their services to the public.
The development has continued until the present situation where there are 31 countries with national Eurodesk partners (EU 27, plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Turkey) supporting more than 900 regional and local Eurodesk relays (these are mainly located with existing local Youth Information providers).
During this time the Commission has continued to support the project through the YOUTH programme (initially through the Task Force for Human Resources Education and Youth, which became Directorate General XXII, which in turn became, the present day Directorate General for Education and Culture).
