Honestly… I can’t quite remember the beginnings. Everything was new to me back then. I remember there was a demand for facilitation of internal communication among the National Agencies and the European Commission. When the SALTO Information was established in the Swedish National Agency around 2002, our first task was to develop Youthnet, an intranet/extranet to address that. It felt like a natural project for me to get involved in, and Youthnet became well used and appreciated.

Quite soon, SALTO Information head moved up to become the head of all our National Agency, and I then became the central pillar of the resource centre, even though it was never more than part-time job. Our SALTO was one of the smallest, and I worked in varying constellations with one or two colleagues during the whole time until 2018. After the 15 years in the business, our Resource Centre was discontinued and the baton was passed on to the Estonian National Agency for the broader SALTO Participation and Information.

The biggest external contribution to the youth sector as the SALTO Information was probably the creation of the Otlas partner-finding tool, which we launched in 2011. This helped youth projects from all the involved countries to find partners to develop youth projects together. As far as I see, it’s still going strong almost 15 years later, although the tool looks like it could do with a bit of modernisation.

The annual hosting of the CIOST – the Information and Communication Officers Staff Training – with participants from all the National Agencies, was also a very appreciated and productive task. It helped build a network of communication competence and the spread of good ideas and best practices among communication officers.