Digital discussions - youth and Europe

The new reality in Europe with unforeseeable events and deepening climate crisis will severely affect today’s young people in Europe. These challenges and changing circumstances require us to look...

The new reality in Europe with unforeseeable events and deepening climate crisis will severely affect today’s young people in Europe. These challenges and changing circumstances require us to look for new ways to support young people's engagement in decision-making processes and discussions in Europe. Therefore, our objectives with this project were following: 1) Develop a new international hybrid discussion format to allow new ways for public discussions between young people over Europe; 2) Implement and introduce the new format in a hybrid mini discussion events, including discussions broadcasted from 3 different countries in August 2023; 3) Build youth organisations' capacities to organise hybrid events and quality discussions and create opportunities for the format to be used. With this project we aimed to reach 200 young people with the discussions events, train 40 young leaders to organise discussions and reach 50 new youth/student organisations with our dissemination activities.

To achieve these objectives, the main activities implemented were: 1) Development process to develop a new hyperlocal discussion format that included engaging experts to the development and creating instruction materials to write the learnings down. 2) Facilitate three hyperlocal discussions to pilot the new format, gain the skills and show new ways for discussions for young people 3) Train youth organisations to organise public discussions in Estonia and Latvia 4) Introduce the new format to youth organisations over Europe to create opportunities for the use of the new format.

1) We organised three hyperlocal discussions in Estonia, Latvia and Finland which were attended by 140 young people in total. 2) We trained 29 youth organisations and 91 young leaders of these organisations in Riga and Tartu to organise discussions. 3) We introduced the hyperlocal discussion format to organisations and young leaders over Europe in Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, Finland through attending events, resulting to reach 42 youth organisations (in addition to the 29 organisations already reached through training). 4) Developed the skills and competences of our organisations on organising hyperlocal and transnational discussions, throughout the project we engaged 19 team members from our teams into the various project activities. Additional 9 team members from 5 different organisations we engaged as partners into the organisation of our activities to increase engagement. Additionally, this project's experiences and work has directly helped to find ways to use this format with other youth organisations. DD is organising a pan-European discussion festival in 2024 using the same formats. Through the preparations, we have reached and contacted additionally over 40 different organisations from all over Europe.