Moving Democracy Online
This Erasmus+ Youth project opened the “Moving Democracy Online” initiative of the Foundation. The project aimed at providing a platform for young people to get in dialogue with representatives of The Hague politics, policy makers and other stakeholders. By taking stock of the present situation regarding the dynamics of the democratic processes, youngsters collected new approaches, learnt to make their voices heard and discovered new things about each other’s cultures.
Getting young people more involved in the EU digital democratic process was one main objective we wanted to achieve with this project. Young people learnt about democracy through active engagement. The project facilitated participants to meet with politicians with different backgrounds, with policy makers and other experts in order to stimulate their learning process and their reflection about participating to the democratic life in Europe.
Participants came up with concrete proposals to help improve the e-democracy tools enabling youngsters to voice their opinions, as a direct result of discussing with those responsible for youth policies at local and
European levels. In their turn, the decision-makers got involved in an active dialogue with the youngsters, listening to their voice, finding out their needs to participate to the democratic life and discussing ways to take them into account.
Moving Democracy Online project, implemented by our Foundation with the support of Erasmus+Jeugd, was launched in January with a series of webinars – aiming at equipping participants with various e-tools to be used during the youth participation meeting planned for March in The Hague.
The first virtual meeting took place on January 31st 2022 and focused on the Conference on the Future of Europe, the youth engagement and youth participation at European level.
Our guest speaker was Tudor Petru Fabian, policy adviser at the European Parliament in Brussels but also a former participant in our Foundation’s projects.
Tudor spoke about the COFOEU in an informal way, challenging participants to exercise the online voting, to work in multicultural groups and come up with answers and suggestions to the questions asked (among them, the top three priorities of the youngsters in a perfect EU scenario, their main worries about the future or shortcomings of social media tools).
The project is attended by 50 participants from 5 countries: Bulgaria, Iceland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Romania.
The concrete results of the project were gathered in a Guide and a Video and :
