The project aimed to encourage young people’s civic engagement by making participation and collective action more accessible, concrete and attractive. The partners sought to: Highlight the diversity of engagement pathways and challenge the idea that engagement is reserved for specific profiles. Develop young people’s civic, social and transversal skills such as cooperation, empathy, critical thinking, creativity and initiative. Involve young people as active contributors in the design of educational tools. Create educational tools that are easy to use and accessible to youth workers, teachers, families and young people themselves. Equip youth professionals with practical resources to support existing engagement initiatives or to stimulate the desire to get involved. Strengthen sustainable cooperation between French and Belgian partner organisations.
The four partner organisations have been working on youth citizenship and engagement for many years, but with very different target groups. At OMJC in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, young people already wish to get involved and mainly need methodological support to structure their initiatives. At the MDA in Tourcoing, the audience is diverse, including young people already involved in associations, students, as well as lower and upper secondary school pupils who need to be introduced to civic engagement. At Portes Ouvertes in Tournai, young people are mainly facing social difficulties. They initially attend activities for leisure or social support and are not familiar with civic engagement concepts. They often come from non-militant families and have little or no prior experience of engagement. L’Établi works across the Hauts-de-France region, particularly in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, where the priority is to remove barriers to engagement and to demonstrate the benefits of collective action in terms of learning, socialisation, skills development, self-confidence and social cohesion. The project was therefore designed to bring together these different perspectives, share practices and jointly respond to complementary needs through a Euro