All three of us — Youth Policy Labs, bOJA, and Nuorisoseurat — were deep in our own digital youth work trenches. We’d run workshops, written guides, hosted webinars… you name it. And yet, we kept hearing the same thing from colleagues across Europe: “I’m so tired of this. It feels like we’re just reacting, not leading.”

Then came the data. The RAY Research Network dropped a report showing that despite all our efforts, youth workers felt least confident about digital skills compared to any other area. Only 25.7% felt they’d learned something useful about information literacy. Ouch.

That was our ‘shock moment.’ We realised we weren’t alone in feeling this digital fatigue — and worse, our young people were paying the price. We were drowning in tools and tactics, but starving for strategy and joy.

So, we did the only sensible thing: we called each other. No fancy pitch decks, just honest Zoom calls (yes, we still use it) filled with sighs, ideas, and a shared determination to flip the script. “Zooming Out” was born — not from a grand plan, but from a collective need to breathe, rethink, and rediscover the fun in digital youth work.