Valentin Rühlmann

Valentin is redefining youth work with a timely intervention, piloting his model in peripheral communities of Eastern Germany where an update on how changemaking is understood and practiced is required. In an era when young people are overflown with information and news from across the world and yet are not given the agency to change things for better, Valentin and FACK e.V. are building the skills, spaces, and mindset to put youth in charge.

Europe has a rich history of youth work with prominent organizations, youth-specific EU funding mechanisms, and municipalities and schools organizing their own programs. However most of these solutions are becoming outdated in the face of a fast-changing society across the continent. The status quo is falling short in covering two important aspects of youth work due to institutionalization of centralized governance: The first aspect is enabling youth leadership, most youth work in Europe is organized by adults thus lacking actively youth-generated strategies. The second aspect is reaching youth from non-mainstream backgrounds. Young people in their early teens, from rural communities, or from low-income families are often left behind by mainstream youth programs causing them to miss out on changemaking or before they have already formed a lifepath.

Valentin believes that doing something good for one’s community can be the first step to their changemaking journey and all young people should have access to that experience. Through FACK e.V., he builds the pre-conditions of young changemaking in Germany, beginning in rural communities and small towns where this infrastructure is most absent. FACK deliberately targets young people who are “not-yet-engaged” in public life, offering them simple pathways into their changemaking journey. The intervention is designed in three parallel layers, simultaneously affecting (1) how youth understand themselves and their surroundings, (2) how youth organize their first activity in changemaking, and (3) how to build a youth ecosystem that supports them in this journey. This approach is designed to advance three specific competencies in young individuals that initiate the aimed mindset change: reflective capacity, the attribution of responsibility, and self-efficacy.

The three together implement Valentin’s insight, forged in his own experience of emerging from being a shy teenager, that the way for a young person to move into their “superpower” is to give to others.The first layer of intervention offers a structured self-reflection for young people. FACK helps participants identify what matters to them, what they would like to create or change in their communities, and how they relate to others around them. This process turns a diffuse sense of frustration into something more actionable: a clearer understanding of one's own needs and values. The second layer gives young people the sense of responsibility to give back to their communities. Starting with something as simple as organizing an open-air gathering, participants take their first steps as community initiators. These small-scale activities have proven to be a consistent source of peer inspiration, drawing others into FACK's community organically. The third layer connects emerging young leaders with the existing institutions who support youth work. Be it the local youth center or the municipality, FACK enables a social and financial safety net for the growing community of young leaders. Working with a network of like-minded people, young people experience an improved self-efficacy.

Across all three layers, Valentin employs a comprehensive impact measurement framework that identifies indicators of meaningful participation and tracks whether the intended changes are taking place, thus documenting specific changes that result from the intervention over time. The work on impact measurement signals an important aspect of their scaling strategy: each changemaker brings in a new changemaker. As young leaders of FACK become well-connected in their local networks, they draw in more peers as well as adults to support their work. While one person can bring in a family center from their small town to support the work, another can influence a local museum’s manager to open space for youth-led events. The model of FACK scales through (1) youth getting influenced by their peers and deciding to act, (2) youth pulling in more support to their work with help of FACK’s core team. All in all, this model acts as a changemaker-maker hub across critical regions of Germany. As FACK matures, Valentin envisions a time when its youth-led system will be integrated into the institutional support budgets, starting at the local level and working their way to the national leadership.

In understanding FACK’s innovation and impact, it is crucial to understand the conditions it works in. Valentin aims to update how young changemaking is supported across Germany and beyond but starts in the eastern half of the country as the communities there are often neglected and the youth are under threat of extremism. With neo-fascism gaining popularity in the region, attracting youth to changemaking becomes necessary and important.

The eastern context is not incidental; it is structural. The Berlin Wall fell only 36 years ago, meaning most adults in Eastern Germany experienced state-controlled public life through their youth years. Under the German Democratic Republic (GDR), civic participation was organized around political comradery and directed from above, leaving little room for self-organized community life. Upon the fall of the wall, Germans of the East faced a new challenge in relation to their western counterparts as the Western Germans experienced a more self-organized public life and civic participation. This cultural and social difference created a new inequality for the residents of the East, especially for those in rural areas and small towns.

Following the unification, state and federal institutions offered support to re-activate citizen-led public life in the East. However, they fell short in closing the gap between two distinct societies, causing a decades-long brain drain towards the West where more opportunities exist socially, economically, and culturally. Over the years, formal and informal youth programs were run in the East, but they lacked two elements to foster a changemaking ecosystem: A consistent support to youth leadership and the willingness to reach the “unlikely” profiles of young changemakers.

Digital life amplifies the pressure. Social media floods young people with comparisons and choices they lack the tools to navigate. Watching Greta Thunberg lead a campaign against the oil industry can be inspiring, but it can also lead to a sense of incapability and uselessness when one is concerned by similar issues but has not yet acted on it. Without a grounded sense of efficacy, many default to the most familiar paths rather than genuinely exploring who they want to be. The result is rising rates of anxiety and depression; around one in five young people in Germany shows persistent mental health impairments. This further erodes their capacity to engage, take initiative, or imagine a different future.

Existing political institutions also fall short in supporting or engaging these youngsters in their work. Over two-thirds of young Germans say they don't feel politically heard. At the same time, AfD (Alternative für Deutschland - the right-wing extremist political party) has been recruiting many young people as voters and volunteers, especially in the east, consequently doubling their seats in the parliament from 2021 to 2025.

As most countries in Europe witness the rise of extreme right-wing groups, especially amongst youth, FACK pilots a new way of civic participation in the region. Positioning youth as creators of public life at a very early age, supporting them with skills and networks to thrive, and creating spaces for them to encounter peers of all backgrounds; FACK is organizing a timely intervention in the young changemaking space.

Valentin believes in the power of doing something good for one's community and how it changes the perception of youngsters if they get to experience it at a very young age. With this conviction, he builds FACK on a simple two-layered strategy: Activating young people and creating a web of support for them.

Activating young people starts by reaching the right young people. FACK's selection of their primary target group is deliberate and strategic: Not-yet-engaged ones. As a youth worker himself, Valentin witnessed over the years the traditional youth work offers opportunities to already engaged, extroverted, concerned, young leaders. There is also a disengaged group who are apathetic towards issues of their community, often mentally detached and unmotivated, and at risk of getting involved with extremist groups, be it online or offline. Valentin identifies an important group between these two edges: Not-yet-engaged teenagers who have the potential to do local community organizing and influence the disengaged peers to join them. Although this is an important part of FACK's recruitment strategy, the programs are open to anyone who wants to join.

The entry point is radical simplicity: no application, no finished idea, no special talent required; only the courage to take a first step. Young people find FACK through the FACKtory, FACK's open creative space in central Altenburg; through Community Hubs embedded in peripheral areas; through schools and local partnerships; and through word of mouth. A community manager then holds a first, non-binding conversation.

As soon as they confirm their interest, young participants are welcomed to a three-layered self-development program that is designed to unlock their changemaking capacity. First the Macher (“doer”) Program: Young people aged 11–26 develop and implement a real project for their community; something that matters to people around them, small enough to succeed, real enough to demand responsibility. A youth coach guides without directing, the young person owns every decision. Second, the Coaching Program turns participants into activators. After completing their own project, young people train as Changemaker Coaches, peer companions guiding the next Macher generation. In a regular week, a Changemaker Coach spends 30 minutes actively coaching a peer in their project, and another 30 minutes reflecting on their learnings along the way, surfacing challenges, and discussing solutions with the FACK team.

Last but not least, the Leadership Program is for those ready to build whole ecosystems. Participants commit for a full year to constructing a local FACK Community; recruiting peers, anchoring spaces, and building the conditions under which Macher and Coaching programs can eventually run without FACK's direct involvement. Such as a group of young people in Dobitschen (ages 16–18) taking over an existing youth club space and running it themselves. They organize weekly gatherings, decide community rules, and recruit peers.

All three levels of engagement share a common methodology: individual sparring, peer group learning, and learning-by-doing. At each stage, decision-making power, organizational roles, and accountability remain with young people, making them active architects of the system rather than passive beneficiaries. This also results in FACK activities being locally relevant, answering to the actual needs of peripheral communities.

To date, FACK has engaged 3,592 young people across cities, leading up to 471 youth-led events and gatherings. The model generated over 10,500 individual participation moments through visits, events, meetings, and project involvements for local citizens, and young people took responsibility to implement an idea more than 2,000 times.

This well thought journey of young people must be accompanied by the foundation of a relevant ecosystem, thus Valentin builds new initiatives and updates the existing institutions to create that ecosystem. The second pillar of FACK strategy focuses on creating that pre-condition of changemaking for youth.

A key pillar of the FACK ecosystem is the Community Hubs led by FACK participants who’ve been through the Macher, Coaching, and Leadership programs. Community Hubs make use of existing civic structures (e.g. dormant associations, underused spaces, youth clubs) to enable youth ownership at the local level. FACK identifies a young person with a genuine felt problem, a sense of personal ownership, and the impulse to bring others along. That person becomes a Hub Manager, employed on a part-time basis, and is connected to a local partner organization or supported in building one from scratch. With a budget for events and FACK's methodology behind them, the Hub Manager runs projects, draws more young people in, and gradually builds a community that sustains itself independently.

Four Community Hubs are operational in the Altenburger Land, with a fifth launched in Saxony. FACK is active in two East German states (Thuringia and Saxony), with all five as its target by 2028. Across all four hubs, the pattern is consistent: young people have moved from participants to initiators.

Another aspect of the ecosystem work is shifting the practices and mindsets of existing institutions. Valentin understands in detail how the existing national programs and their leaders and budgets work. He proactively reaches key decision makers, mayors, and youth work leaders in priority states to invite them to their movement, adopt their methodology, or simply support the young leaders in their districts. Institutions that have long struggled to engage young people are now coming to FACK. The mayor of Altenburg allocated a public building to the youth community. The Altenburg Family Centre partnered with FACK and now runs a fully self-sustaining, volunteer-organized meeting point open multiple times a week. In the near future, Valentin aims to work more on methodology transfer to similar organizations rather than opening more FACK branches. A structured one-year accompaniment program is in development, through which external organizations are coached, assessed against shared milestones, and certified as part of a common quality network. Alongside this, FACK is working to embed its programs into statutory local youth development plans, shifting its relationship with municipalities from project-by-project funding to a structural one. In the long term, Valentin quietly says that his aim is to take this change beyond Germany, to “change the world” through instilling changemaking agency in youth.

Valentin grew up like the most Eastern Germans of the 2000s, in close quarters with family, studying with limited resources, and yet enjoying a lively childhood with his siblings. He had one advantage in comparison to his peers, a social worker father and a kindergarten teacher mother who used their professional knowledge to train their kids on the social issues of Germany, be it the fascism or the anti-immigrant sentiments.

He grew up to be a shy teenager in Altenburg, but it changed when he became the student representative and the same year, masses of refugees arrived in East Germany. This created a shock in their small town as none of the students were used to seeing people different than themselves in the classroom. Valentin started an initiative to turn this feeling of unfamiliarity into a sense of community. Together with his peers, Valentin raised donations to help refugee families and organized a public counter-presence to the far-right groups that had mobilized within days. This experience left Valentin with one learning: As soon as there is a concrete problem in hand and someone willing to take the first step, young people will quickly organize to act. That personal discovery became the source of his future efforts: Helping young people find their own capacity for change through the act of doing something for someone else.

Over the years, Valentin continued working in his peer groups to organize youth projects to tackle the shared issues of the region. He worked with some of the prominent institutions in youth work but felt discouraged by their lack of willingness to include young people in decision making and strategy setting. After a series of failed efforts to change existing organizations from within, Valentin decided to build FACK to create an exemplary model of young people leading for change.