KIYO strengthens professionals from several European countries in working with youth on active citizenship

Active Citizenship promotes an inclusive and resilient society where individuals have the opportunity to be involved and feel responsible for their own environment. So, how can you embed Active Citizenship more structurally in your organisation or activities with young people?

KIYO, in cooperation with the French organisation Lianes Coopération, is developing a free comprehensive Toolbox on Active Citizenship for young people! The toolbox provides facilitators with proven tools to support young people in developing skills and worldviews to become active citizens. To start with, the Toolbox will be released in English, with the hope that other language versions will be available by 2025.

Fien Wilms - Facilitator at KIYO ngo (Belgium) 

‘KIYO has years of experience in working around active citizenship. We feel the need to capitalise our approach and methodologies so that we can better exchange with others and learn as much as possible from each other. The meeting with Lianes and the partnership that followed with the support of Erasmus+ was the perfect opportunity for us to start this great work!’

What is ‘Active Citizenship’?

During a two-day interactive workshop in Belgium on 19 and 20 September 2024, organised by KIY0 and Lianes Coopération, 23 different practitioners from 6 different European countries (Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Belgium and France) were brought together to experience, reflect and enrich our new Toolbox on Active Citizenship for Youth Workers. 

This workshop was organised as part of a partnership on the theme of youth between Lianes coopération and KIYO, funded by Erasmus+ since 2023 and also supported by JINT. Over the past year, the two associations have pooled their practices in supporting young people to become active citizens. The product of this collaboration is a toolbox aimed at those involved in non-formal youth education. KIYO, however, is active in formal secondary education. The tools are tried and tested and ready to be used in formal education. Moreover, several participants, who are mainly active in formal education, clearly expressed their interest in using the tools in their work.

The participants all have their own expertise and experiences and their own unique perspective on what ‘Active Citizenship’ means to them. Ouarda Bouchti - Project Leader at De Stroate vzw (Belgium), shares her view: ‘For me, it's in the little things. By engaging with young people, by being inclusive in your environment and letting people meet each other who come from very different backgrounds. By making young people aware of the impact they can have, no matter how big or small. That is the way we work on active citizenship.’

Olivier Loubes - Project Manager for Virage Energie (France), concurs with the different levels of action of ‘Active Citizenship’: ‘For us, active citizenship means participating in city life. And then of course giving young people the opportunity to participate in public debates. Giving them the right arguments. And then knowing and understanding the power relations at play in the field of energy and climate, and thus being aware of what is at stake globally.’

A session with KIYO and Lianes Coopération

Together, participants interactively engaged with the toolkit under the guidance of four facilitators from KIYO and Lianes Coopération. We had two goals for this seminar. We wanted participants to experience the tools and we wanted to know if the tools were well written so that other facilitators could use them without too much preparation. So we decided to facilitate part of the seminar and ask several participants to prepare and facilitate some tools for us. For the seminar organisers, it was an exercise in letting go and that is exactly what we want facilitators to do when working with young people. We want to create an environment where young people can experiment and learn without wanting to control everything that happens.

Emil Nielsen - project manager for Oxfam Denmark (Denmark), shares her impressions on how she experienced the workshop and working with the toolbox: ‘I think the way you develop the materials and show them to us was very good because you have so much focus on peers. Every time you work with a group, you have to start from the slogan ‘Nothing about us without us’, and it feels like this material [the toolbox] is really grounded in the young people. And you can really feel that when you read this, there are some good thoughts about what has been implemented and what has worked. So I think it's the right approach.’

Have you felt like getting started on embedding Active Citizenship with young people more structurally in your organisation or activities? Using all the valuable feedback and learnings from this workshop, this Toolbox will be refined in October and made available for free download very soon after, in November!

If you are interested in being notified by email about the launch of the Toolbox, you can sign up via this Google Forms document: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe63D5q7hSaBTCFPQeXd-IYH3H3vmIcSX3SuTKFhhLlcK_9AA/viewform?usp=sf_link