This project gives opportunities for youth workers and teachers working with youth to explore how to implement a participatory budget(PB) processes. We will seek to develop their capacity and competencies towards ensuring the participation of young people in the civic life of the city, community or school. It will be an innovative project that gives an ideal opportunity to experience democracy in action, especially at the local level. We know young people wish to be good citizens, as has been seen by the recent climate change school strikes happening across Europe. This project will harness that energy and help make it into a lifelong learning opportunity. In contrary to the participation in more formal local or parliamentary elections, the participation in the participatory budget is possible at much younger ages. Thus, young people will have an opportunity to learn through experience of what being a good citizen means with a focus on the co-decision possibilities within spending public funds. The experience of the project partners’ shows that it is necessary to undertake further educational and supporting activities, in particular in creating inter-sectoral partnerships in order to increase the involvement of young people in the social life. Not every youth worker or teacher knows the participatory techniques of engaging young people in public life, or see the possibilities of a participatory budget in this regard. There is currently a lack of structured models and classroom materials for the delivery of Participatory Budgeting which is holding back its growth. Educators in both formal and informal settings currently lack the skills or resources to deliver on this concept. We will deliver creative and innovative tools and support youth workers, teachers and educators by creating the toolkit, the guidebook, the video material and the map in national languages of all the partners. The effects of the project shall be developed with TPM - project partners' meetings and LLTA, which will be attended by 30 people from all countries participating in the project. The tools will be subject to a pilot study phase, in which 75 young people will take part. The last phase of the project focus on dissemination of the project results by organizing 5 seminars. The partnership of the project consists of 5 partners from 3 countries - Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom all involved in activities developing civic participation, apply innovative solutions and participative tools with an particular interest in young people. The main aim of the project is to increase the engagement and empowerment of young people. We intend to provide tools and ready-made solutions that will help create more efficient support systems for youth engagement. By analysing the best practices and methodologies of youth education based on municipal participatory tools and school participatory budgeting and the development of common European standards for the inclusion of young people in municipal participatory budgeting over the 2 year length of the project and beyond we will have practical impacts, and facilitate the implementation of more comprehensive youth inclusion.
The main goal of the "Youth PB Accelerator" project was to increase the involvement of young people in formal and informal democratic institutions and strengthen their rights by providing tools and ready-made solutions that would help create more effective methods to support the participation of young people in public decision-making in the local community. The specific aim of the project was to develop the capacities and competences of youth workers, in particular teachers and educators, in the implementation and use of participatory budgeting as a tool for civic education. Through analysis of best practices and methods of youth education based on municipal tools for participatory democracy and school participatory budgets, we developed a coherent model for involving young people in participatory budgeting. By providing this model, we wanted to make an impact by enabling young people to participate in democratic processes in Europe. All in all, the project provided attractive and ready-to-use educational materials that can be used by all youth workers interested in the topic of civic participation.
Participatory budgeting (PB) gives young people an ideal opportunity to experience democratic mechanisms at the local level. Unlike participation in local or parliamentary elections, in many countries it is possible to participate before reaching adulthood (which for most countries in Europe happens at the age of 18), which allows young people to experience what it means to have a say in the spending of public funds and to have a real impact on their neighbourhood. PB in schools is not common in Europe, and there are similarly few examples of youth participatory budgeting at the local authority level. One reason for this is the lack of adequate civic education, both in schools and in the form of informal education. There is currently a lack of structured models and classroom materials to deliver PB which holds back its growth, thus why teachers and educators in both formal and informal settings currently lack the skills or resources to use PB as an educational tool. Therefore, the project responded to the need to provide attractive, high-quality educational materials to youth workers to integrate the topic of participatory budgeting into their daily work and ultimately increase the social participation of young people.