Participative Democracy

Third day of the Swedish Conference, the “Opinion Square”

opinionThe third day of the Conference was productive in terms of policy ideas. The “Opinion Square” is a wonderful tool to give feedback on all the issues that the 10 working groups discussed. To be short, every working group presented their policy ideas on a board. We all moved around and endorsed or not the ideas. If we wanted to add something, we just wrote our new ideas on a post it. Once the exercise ended, we went back to our working groups and discusses about the feedback that we got. After one more hour of debating, we came up with the final policy proposals on youth participation:

– Participation should be the underlying principle of EU Youth Strategy.

– The EU Youth Strategy should be focused, specific and prioritized.

– Various forms of Youth participation should be better recognized and promoted. More knowledge on participation is needed.

– Youth organizations are the key actors promoting and supporting youth participation.

– We are calling for sustainable, easily accesible and youth friendly legal and financial support to ensure better outreach to young people.

– Make better use of existing structures making them more open, accessible and using creative ways to involve more young people. Youth opinion should be taken into account in all areas and be worked on in a cross-sectoral way.

– A Youth perspective has to be mainstreamed into all political and civic processes. We call for structured dialogue with young people on all levels and dimensions.

– We call for age-appropriate preparation for participation from an early age through peer education, non-formal education and revised formal education curriculum.

– One-stop services about various forms of participation of/for young people and youth organizations on the national level have to be provided and promoted.

– A Communication strategy should be created to promote positive image of participation to young people and promoting success stories of youth participation to the whole society.

– Extra efforts have to be made to outreach to less involved young people and youth groups.

– Member states have to share good practice on participation of young people.

Most of the key messages were debated on the stage with the representatives from the European Commission and the European Youth Forum: