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Democracy is reloading in 2024

You can read here the plans of the partnership for 2024.

The Democracy Reloading Partnership is involving the Erasmus+ national agencies of the following countries in 2024: Belgium (French and Dutch speaking communities), France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, the Netherlands, Hungary, Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Greece, Cyprus, Iceland, Bulgaria, and started consultations with relevant youth services in Armenia and Switzerland. It means that these countries can send participants to the Democracy Reloading activities.

The steering committee of the Partnership decided to work on the 2.0 version of the Democracy Reloading website in 2024 with the aim to make it more informative, more structured and easy to use, and in a second phase to make the online toolkit more user friendly for those municipalities that start working on the involvement of young people in municipal decisions. The renewed website will be available in autumn and the new learning tool in the end of 2025. 

Next year we will offer several learning and sharing opportunities for municipal youth policy officers and youth participation experts:

  1. There will be four editions of the Democracy Reloading Webinars, each focusing on one of the four key steps of developing youth participation in municipal decisions. The webinars will be shorter (90 minutes), each webinar will present the Democracy Reloading Toolkit and will invite one municipality youth policy officer to share their practice of engaging young people in their decision-making process.
  2. In February Democracy Reloading and Europe Goes Local in cooperation are working on the implementation of the ‘Local youth work and democracy’ Conference under the Belgian EU Presidency. The event will gather 350 practitioners in the field of local youth work and youth participation from all over Europe. If you are interested you can contact your ministry responsible for youth affairs.
  3. In cooperation with the Portuguese and the Cypriot Erasmus+ agencies we are organising two Municipalities4Democracy training courses (one in Portugal and one in Cyprus) for municipal youth policy officers based on the Democracy Reloading Toolkit.
  4. The coordinating agency Bureau International Jeunesse is organising a specific training activity for youth policy officers (for big cities or for small cities) based on the Toolkit in October.
  5. Together with the Dutch Erasmus+ Youth agency we are organising an Expert Meeting of trainers, consultants and multipliers of the Partnership at the end of 2024 in the Netherlands.
  6. We are working on designing a Project laboratory for municipal youth officers on how to use Erasmus+ Youth funds to develop municipal youth participation in decision-making. The Norwegian Erasmus+ Youth agency will host one of these activities in early 2025, and we may have another edition in 2024 in cooperation with another national agency.
  7. In collaboration with the Council of Europe Youth Department, within the framework of the Democracy Here, Now program we are organising a European Study Visit to Strasbourg for municipality youth policy officers. The activity will include visits to the City of Strasbourg, the Council of Europe co-management structure for youth, and the European institutions of both the Council of Europe (Congress of Local and Regional Authorities) and the European Parliament.
  8. We are working on establishing an online European community of practice for municipal youth policy officers, that can operate from 2024 and support the exchange of practices and cooperation among policy officers in Europe.
  9. Euromed Municipalites4Democracy LTTC: Democracy Reloading is planning a specific long term training course municipal policy officers of the EUROMED region, for partnering countries of North Africa and Middle East. It will consist of an initial training course, a practical phase and an evaluation seminar. We foresee that the initial training course will take place at the end of 2024 in Belgium.

All these activities will be published on SALTO in due tile in 2024, and will be communicated through the Democracy Reloading Newsletter and the Facebook page. If you have questions, you can contact the Partnership coordinator at laszlo.foldi@cfwb.be 

We keep on cooperating closely with the Europe Goes Local Partnership, the Council of Europe Youth Department, DYPALL Network, SALTO Participation and the Partnership NewPowerin Youth.

The Partnership is open for other countries if you think that being part of the Democracy Reloading community you can contact your Erasmus+ national agency (in EU member states) or your national youth service (in other European countries) and propose to become a member in 2025.