Democracy Reloading in 2025

The Democracy Reloading Partnership will have three new full members, Spain and Slovakia from 2024, and Cyprus from 2025. From the end of 2024 a completely new Democracy Reloading website will be available at the same url:

https://democracy-reloading.eu/ 

The new website will provide more information about European and national training activities, about tools that municipalities can use to develop youth participation in municipal decision-making, and it will also support advocating for youth participation helping local youth policy officers to provide strong arguments against stereotypical opinions about youth among local decision makers.

In 2025 we foresee 3-4 editions of the Municipalities4Democracy flagship training course for municipal youth policy officers, 1-2 editions of the Youth4Democracy training course for local youth representatives, 1 edition of the Youth&Municipalitiies4Democracy training course for tandems of policy officers and youth representatives. These training courses will take place in Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain and Poland. We plan to organise one Study Visit looking into local youth participation policies of a specific region in Slovakia, and we also plan new pilot course for municipal youth policy officers about designing Erasmus+ Youth projects to develop municipal youth participation in Norway, with the title Erasmus4Democracy ProjectLab. Inspired by the success of the joint activity with the Council of Europe Youth Department, the Study Visit to Strasbourg, we plan to continue the collaboration and organise another joint activity in 2025 or 2026.

BIJ, the French speaking Erasmus+ agency in cooperation with the French Erasmus+ agency and SALTO Euromed Centre are planning a Municipalites4Democracy Euromed long term training course for municipalities of some countries of the Euromed region (Morocco, Tunisia…) in 2025 and 2026. The first event of the long term training program will take place at the end of 2025.

We are already preparing a bigger event with the Dutch Erasmus+ national agency in February next year in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It will be the Expert Seminar with 50 national and European trainers, experts and national coordinators of the Democracy Reloading Partnership. The Seminar will aim to establish a professional European community of experts of youth participation in municipal decision-making, to exchange training and consultancy practices in this field, to explore how to improve national strategies and activities and also to develop cooperation among all stakeholders. We also invited the representatives of our main strategic partners such as the Council of Europe Youth Department, DYPALL Network, SALTO Participation and Europe Goes Local.

In 2025 we also continue organising 4 Democracy Reloading Webinars, each focusing on the one of the 4 KEY TASKS of the Reference Framework, and each featuring one municipal practitioner who shares their municipal youth participation practice. The webinars are planned for March, May, September and November.

All training activities will be published on the SALTO website in due time from January onwards. You can also find the calls on the Facebook page and in our Newsletters.

You can also expect the yearly Democracy Reloading Impact Report about this year (2024) in May 2025. The Reports 2022, 2023 and 2024 will be available in the new website.

Please inform your colleagues and other municipal authorities that you know about Democracy Reloading and its activities in 2025, so that we can reach and involve more and more towns in the Democracy Reloading community.