Changemakers of Tomorrow
The Changemakers of Tomorrow project is part of the 2022 European Youth Foundation Campaign called “Democracy Here, Democracy Now!” and looks at addressing disillusionment with democracy from an international, socialist perspective. The weeklong training will look at developing competencies in community organizing and in using it to encourage meaningful youth participation.
Participants will then have seed money to run their own campaigns to encourage youth engagement in their own communities.
Aims and Objectives of Changemakers of Tomorrow
The aim of this project is to give young people the tools necessary for meaningful participation to create spaces for democratic participation. Through equipping them to engage in democracy, we hope to develop their skills from citizens into makers of change through non-formal educational practices.
And the specific objectives are the following:
- Objective one is to creates a space for a network of young active citizens to share campaign strategies and tips for youth participation from around the world which can be used to involve young people in local democratic processes.
- Objective two is to facilitate meaningful participation in local level politics by using non-formal education methodology to build competencies such as community building, group organising and campaigning.
- Objective three is to reawakens and strengthen civil society by having young people organise community politics in their local groups towards positive change.
- Objective four is addressed throughout the project by using non-formal education methods to build a strong group and network of changemakers. By spending a lot of time examining the similarities and differences in their local situations and how they can support each other to participate in democracy, they will make up the start of the network of active young citizens. We thought about creating a digital platform to host this network however we realised that young people are already using digital spaces to organise and support each other, and that the effort taken to create another would be wasted in relation to how much it was used. We therefore propose to host this network on basecamp as it is easy to have as an application on their phone.
- Objective five Building a network with a common understanding of the reasons behind the disillusionment with democracy leads us to objective two, the skills development aspect of the project. Here our network of young people will build competencies such as community building, group organising and campaigning as well as use other tools to aid in these processes such as recognising fake news and motivational speaking. These skills will facilitate their meaningful participation in any democratic structures the young people participate in from IFM-SEI member organisations or congress to local politics to national or international systems. They are about enabling young people to have a seat at any table they wish to be at and practicing the skills necessary to get there.
What kind of outputs will we have in the end?
- Development of at least 10 localised action plans for increased participation in democratic space
- 1.5-minute educational video on democracy from our participants point of view and its importance in upholding human rights
- Creation of an interactive platform for storytelling and sharing ideas. This will be shared on our website. This will allow participants to share videos, photos and text about their projects and campaigns including how they planned it, how they implemented it and their reflections upon it. Other visitors to this platform can leave comments on and gather inspiration from the project.
Project Partners
Changemakers of Tomorrow is an International Project funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe within the framework of the Youth Campaign “Democracy here. Democracy now.”
