CIVACT - Promoting civic engagement among hard-to-reach youth through involvement in district development

Project summary

CIVACT addresses low and moderate levels of civic engagement among hard-to-reach youths in urban areas by activating these individuals through their lived experience with their immediate environment. This project‘s goal is to empower these young people to become protagonists through observing and analyzing their neighborhood‘s resources and challenges. Through work with specially trained youth workers, they will gain new experience with civic engagement and the confidence and tools needed to propose changes to urban regeneration and local development. The partnership is made up of organizations from Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Italy and the UK. The project aims to face the following challenges: • disengagement of hard-to-reach youths (youths with migration background and youths at risk of marginalization) from democratic decision-making processes and civic life, and • lack of effective and innovative participative tools for involving hard-to-reach youths in urban decision-making processes. This project seeks to address these challenges through the development of a curriculum of participatory methods for youth workers, which will be adapted to and tested in the five partner countries. This project uses a reflexive methodology based on the PM squared project management methodology and which goes through several cycles of data gathering, testing/matching and revision as follows: As a first step, the partners will each gather socio-economic and other data about their local situations through desk research and focus group work (IO1). The second step will be the development of a database containing good practices and approaches to reach and empower hard-to-reach-youths AND participatory methods in urban development processes. Initial research indicates that this database will include methods such as mapping, role playing, and apps (IO2). Ten of these methods will be selected which address the needs of the partners identified in IO1. These ten methods will be developed into curriculum modules (each partner develops two); after the finalization of the curriculum, two youth workers from each partner country will take part in a train-the-trainer workshop in which they will learn both how to use the methods and also how to instruct others in their use (IO3). In IO4, the partners will each develop a local action plan and test the curriculum in their local context. Finally, the data gathered from surveys with the youth workers and the youths involved and from the previous IOs will inform the best practice guideline (IO5) and the policy recommendations (IO6). The direct reach of this project will be a minimum of five youth workers in each of the five partner cities (25 in total) and 25 youths in each partner city (125 in total). We also expect that there will be a large number of indirect beneficiaries, including organizations and civil servants working in related fields and residents and neighbors in the communities where the curricula will be tested. The project strives for capacity building on two levels. Through direct actions in their neighborhoods, the hard-to-reach youths will have the chance to rethink their own territory and contribute to its regeneration as active subjects and agents of urban change. Supported by the youth workers and responsible actors in district management, they will increase their interest for the local community, actively participate in it through their involvement in the curriculum testing and develop responsibility for their own future – as a first step to becoming active, an intrinsic part of empowerment and civic involvement. In order to achieve this, the youth workers and district managers involved in this project will engage in learning and training activities in which they will acquire, test, and learn to implement new and innovative participatory methods to engage hard-to-reach youths. The impact of the CIVACT project will not end after the 24 months of the project, but will continue as a result of the in-depth dissemination activities planned in the project. Through consultation with youth workers during the development of the curriculum, we aim to develop methods and tools which they will use well beyond the project end. The database, curriculum, and best practice guideline will be developed as templates so that other districts and cities in the partner countries and cities in countries outside the partnership can also test and implement them. It is our sincere hope that these methods will prove useful in improving the sense of empowerment among youths at risk of marginalization in urban areas throughout Europe and serve as a toolkit in other organizations’ and cities’ efforts to engage with and empower these groups.