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Editor:
Presscouncil City of Chemnitz
Pressrelease: 857

City of Chemnitz lays foundation for reprioritisation of youth welfare funding

Administration proposes compromise to the Youth Welfare Committee on 9 December

Over the past few days, the city of Chemnitz has held key talks on the future funding of youth welfare services. The background to this is the tight budget situation, which - as in many German municipalities - means that there are fewer funds available than there are applications. Against this backdrop, Lord Mayor Sven Schulze, Mayor Ralph Burghart, Mayor Dagmar Ruscheinsky, representatives of the Youth Welfare Office and members of the Youth Welfare Committee have been working on a solution.

Mayor Sven Schulze and Gunda Georgi, Head of the Youth Welfare Office of the City of Chemnitz, announced this today.

The aim of the talks was to define priorities for the distribution of available funds. The City of Chemnitz makes it clear that this prioritisation is first and foremost a necessary consequence of the limited financial scope. The youth welfare organisations make a significant contribution to social cohesion and to child and youth work in Chemnitz. The City of Chemnitz aims to support this work as reliably as possible, even under difficult conditions. At the same time, significant increases in expenditure have become apparent in recent years - in particular due to rising personnel costs and an expansion of services.

As a result, key elements of school social work and centralised youth welfare services can be secured with the available funds. In total, the grants to the recognised providers of independent youth welfare services in 2026 on the basis of the "Specialist Funding Guidelines for Youth, Social Affairs and Health (FRL-JSG)" and for school social work will amount to 16 million euros. Nevertheless, the continued funding of individual programmes remains challenging for formal, technical and financial reasons.

On 9 December, the administration will present a concrete proposal to the Youth Welfare Committee on how to proceed and prioritise the funding:

  1. The applications for 52 school social work offers will be awarded funding, taking into account the professional criteria, without cancelling any offers. In view of the budget freeze of 5 per cent, the amount paid out will generally be 95 per cent of the available funds.
  2. The City of Chemnitz provides additional financial resources in the youth, social and health funding guideline via additional income from state funding and reclassifications. This means that a total of 90 independent youth work programmes can be funded in 2026.
  3. The City of Chemnitz will refrain from applying formal exclusion criteria in the evaluation of projects for 2026 and will limit these to technical evaluations based on the service descriptions.
  4. A total of seven projects will no longer be funded. This concerns
    1. the youth workshop of the Verein zur beruflichen Förderung und Ausbildung e. V. (VBFA) and the youth workshop of the Jugendberufshilfe, as funding can be secured via external funding sources.
    2. the QUER BEET open child and youth work programme run by Klinke e. V., as the project has already been discontinued.
    3. the EC Rabenstein children's and youth work of the Saxon youth association EC im LLGS e. V., the Haus der Begegnung of the Regionale Arbeitsgemeinschaft Hilfe für Behinderte Chemnitz und Umgebung e. V., the VIP Junior integration model of young connections e. V. and the "St. Johannis" youth church of the Evangelical Lutheran Youth Parish Office. Youth Parish Office, as they do not meet the quality requirements.
  5. Deficits in the implementation and application of the specialised funding guidelines were identified for five projects. These projects will initially receive a nine-month funding decision with technical and qualitative conditions. The Youth Welfare Committee will decide on further funding until the end of 2026 following a report from the Youth Welfare Office. The financial resources for this are available. This concerns the services Contact Plus (Kinder-, Jugend- und Familienhilfe e. V. Chemnitz), youth and environmental workshops (solaris Förderzentrum für Jugend und Umwelt gGmbH), children's and youth club "Mikado" (Selbsthilfe Wohnprojekt Further Straße e. V.), children's and youth centre TREFF (solaris Förderzentrum für Jugend und Umwelt gGmbH) and JugendMedienZentrum Bumerang (Selbsthilfe Wohnprojekt Further Straße e. V.).
  6. Together with the administration, the Youth Welfare Committee will develop a strategy concept by June 2026 on how to proceed with funding in the years from 2027 onwards, as further funding problems are foreseeable.
  7. The administration will intensify the technical and economic controlling of the programmes and use of funds and report to the Youth Welfare Committee on a quarterly basis.


The aforementioned points represent a viable compromise that is also based on the goal of offering the organisations planning security. If no decision is made by the Youth Welfare Committee this year, there will be no legal basis for all 142 projects to receive funding.

The central task now is to utilise the available funds in such a way that a broad and high-quality range of services can continue to be guaranteed. At the same time, this requires a stronger focus on efficient use of funds and stable compliance with professional standards.