“Youth awareness of the EU system: EU policies and youth participation good practices exchange” is a 16-months project, carried out in collaboration between Croatia, Italy, Portugal and Spain, through the synergistic work of Youth Associations and Local Authorities, which will jointly work to achieve the project's objectives. The project, in fact, was born with two aims: on one side, to train young leaders, youth workers and young administrators engaged in active youth policies implementation activities through specific training, and on the other side to actively involve young people of the participating municipalities, through targeted blended mobility to transfer useful information and skills, with activities that could give space to individual innovative ideas of young people, linked to the issues analysed by the project: the European elections of May 2019, as well as the European Youth Strategy 2021-2027 based on the Council Resolution of 26 November 2018, encouraging the exchange of good practices. The overall objective of the project is the empowerment of young people from different points of view; to achieve this, the project proposes to give space to self-expression and the use of non-formal methods of participation; the development and empowerment of young people are fundamental tools for a democratic change in Europe, because young people are key elements in the processes of local raising-awareness which, thanks to the spill-over effect, allows effective planning in different points. Specific objectives of the project are: - Improve cross-sectorial cooperation in the field of youth, by encouraging dialogue and the exchange of good practices among the partners, sharing with the main actors of the project: the young people; - Strengthen and support young people (Empower), starting from their natural resilience; - Resolve the gap between young people and institutions, starting from changing the political imaginations of the disinterested young man and the too distant institution, with particular attention to the issue related to the upcoming elections. - Create a network, learning all the 2.0 networks channels, to use them consciously and effectively. The proposed project specifically aims to create the conditions for increasing youth participation at the local level, by experimenting with methodologies and practices: all the results will be collected and proposed online through freely accessible platforms. The involved project actors and stakeholders will be young people, as a fundamental tool to promote actions aimed at inclusion and raising awareness, in areas such as those involved in the project where youth participation is very low and the data reveal problems of social inclusion. The partnership will provide skills, network, and experience in the field of youth, willing to create an awareness-raising machine to push people to participate actively in social life, showing how policies and administrations are not so distant from young people but open to new perspectives. The frame of the European Parliamentary Elections of May 2019 and the New Strategies outlined by the European Institutions are the perfect scenarios within this the project arises, having concretely a context where to try and experiment practices of active involvement and training related to the issues. The choice of the partner countries relates to a dual aspect: the non-comforting data on youth absenteeism in elections (A pro-European – and young–electorate with clear expectations, European Parliament DG Communication - 2019) and the low youth participation (Eurobarometer research n.455), especially found on the involved countries of this project, encourage to promote the exchange and the design of new tools, starting from the good practices identified in the participating countries.
Through the activities, the young people who were involved in the mobility itself had the opportunity to see how local youth councils function in the two countries and received information about ways to involve young people in decision-making processes at the local level. Based on the comparison, young people could see what information they lacked during the last EU elections, which, in their opinion, could encourage a more significant number of young people to go to the polls. The participants will encourage young people to be more engaged in political processes by improving the aforementioned platform. During the implementation of the project, civil society organizations connected better with each other, exchanged experiences of working with young people, and cooperation with local authorities. Also, this was an exceptional opportunity so that the Cities could exchange experiences regarding work with young people and, at the same time, be in direct contact with young people so that they could exchange ideas with each other about ways to involve young people in decision-making processes at the district level.
The goal was to mitigate the growing trend of youth disinterest in social and political engagement. Also, many active young people do not use all the tools available to them to strengthen their capacities, thanks to which new opportunities would be created for them. The experience of working with young people at the local level shows a lack of information about the possibilities of inclusion in decision-making processes and a lack of trust of young people in institutions. This is precisely why we decided to include cities whose employees sometimes do not have information on how to approach young people and get information about their needs. The project connected youth, civil society organizations, and local self-government into one European concept so that together they could get a broader picture of how to provide a stimulating environment for young people locally. Through the activities of this project proposal, young people acquired social skills necessary for personal development, received information about tools that enable them to turn their ideas into actions, and acquired additional knowledge about existing youth policies.