Com’ON Europe – European Platform of Participatory Budgeting for Youth Erasmus Project

Project Title

Com’ON Europe – European Platform of Participatory Budgeting for Youth

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Reaching the policy level/dialogue with decision makers

Project Summary

Com’ON Europe connects two specific aspects, youth participation and participatory budgeting, and this way it becomes original, unique. The reason for this is that it keeps the principle of participatory budgeting (deciding on public money’s faith) but it provides a double-sided platform through the engagement with mostly unorganised young people willing to organise themselves but not in legally established organisations. This enables bringing forward untapped energies of young people in shaping community life in cities.

All partners came from former European Youth Capital cities: Torino 2010, Braga 2012, Maribor 2013, Thessaloniki 2014, Cluj-Napoca 2015, Varna 2017 and Cascais 2018.

The European Youth Capital is a title awarded by the European Youth Forum designed to empower young people, boost youth participation and strengthen European identity. Each year, a new European city is given the chance to showcase its innovative ideas, projects and activities that aim to raise up young voices and bring a new youth perspective to all aspects of city life.

The GOAL of this project was to create an open source framework for European cities in implementing participatory budgeting processes for youth, which address young people not just as creators and initiators but also as decision makers themselves while also creating a platform for cooperation for cities which applied similar processes or are willing to apply it in the future.

The GENERAL OBJECTIVE of this project was to contribute to the improvement of civic participation of young people in local life through local level participatory budgeting mechanisms. It sought to contribute to the increase young people’s spirit of creativity, associativity, entrepreneurship, and community development by providing a safe environment for planning and coming forward as informal groups with small-scale initiatives, while providing funding on behalf of the municipalities, and delegating decisions towards the local community about which initiatives to be supported.

The project worked to achieve the following SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:
O1: to create a clear general policy framework in order to increase civic participation of young people through dedicated participatory budgeting processes for youth in urban communities based on theory and practice which connects European policies with local level practical implementation, while also bringing up local experience to the European playfield (LOCAL-EUROPEAN),
O2: to provide participatory urban environments for young people and for public authorities based on trust, assistance and easy access and with the active contribution of the civil society (DECISION, VOTE), to reach out to young people and to enable their creativity serving the quality of life and the sense of belonging and ownership in cities (IDEA, INITIATIVE),
O3: to enable other cities to adopt similar participatory processes and to consolidate the cooperation of European cities (and especially cities involved in the Network of European Youth Capitals) regarding youth participation through the creation of the Citizen Y Resource Centre and an open source methodology and toolkit (NETWORK, FRAMEWORK).

The project’s results in key numbers:

* 1 framework in 7 European languages, available open source for scaling and multiplication,
* 1 new brand for participatory budgeting for youth: Com’ON Europe,
* 5 key elements of a framework for Participatory Budgeting for Youth in Europe (white paper, resource centre, toolkit for participatory budgeting processes and the European group of youth facilitators),
* 7 Participatory Budgeting for Youth Action Plans in 7 cities from 6 countries for 2019, which are harmonised by methodology,
* 24 tools of empowering young people at local level collected in a single toolkit,
* 28 youth facilitators organised in a European network which can be deployed in an international environment in order to provide further scaling,
* 2,885 young people involved in co-creating ideas and proposals for initiatives to be funded by participatory budgeting for youth,
* 6,000 European level stakeholders targeted by dissemination activities and publications,
* 63,550 people expressing their choice for initiatives proposed by young people,
* 625,000 euro allocated for small scale initiatives of informal groups of young people through participatory budgeting for youth processes,
* 1.611 million people reached altogether.

The strategic project was built on 14 management activities, 4 intellectual outputs with a total of 12 activities, 2 training activities of staff (short term) and 4 multiplier events.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 252391 Eur

Project Coordinator

ASOCIATIA GRUPUL PONT PONT CSOPORTPONT GROUP & Country: RO

Project Partners

• COMUNE DI TORINO
• Fundação Bracara Augusta
• Omilos UNESCO Neon Thessalonikis
• MUNICIPIO DE CASCAIS
• VARNA-EUROPEAN YOUTH CAPITAL ASSOCIATION, SDRUZHENIE VARNA-EUROPEYSKAMLADEZHKA STOLITSA
• MLADINSKI KULTURNI CENTER MARIBOR