‘Find your way in local government’ - The journey of a youth project around the globe: a project, which was originally established in the US finds via the Netherlands its way to you?

Already since the 1990s the IPP has been successfully implementing the project ‘Find your way in local government’ in the Netherlands. At the moment every year 2000 pupils from 40 Dutch municipalities participate in the project. The goal is to give young people aged 14-19 years old the conditions and the opportunities to acquire skills necessary for taking an active part in local democratic decision-making processes.

After some introductory lessons at school, pupils visit a municipality for a whole day. There they work in groups on a certain topic, writing project proposals that should be implemented on a later stage by the municipality. Municipal councillors and civil servants are with their expertise at the youngsters’ disposal. Some of the scholars are representing the ‘media’ group, which is following all events closely and is working on a special newspaper edition of the ‘Action Day’.

In the evening a council session takes place under the chairmanship of the mayor of the respective municipality. Here the pupils vote for the best project. The respective municipality on its turn is taking care for the funding and implementation of the chosen project in close co-operation with the youngsters.

Through this experience the involved pupils learn in a fashionable way a lot about local politics and related things: how to write a good project-proposal including a realistic budget? – Where to find adequate information? – But also how to debate about your project, how to lobby for it and to make concessions at the end…

The original project idea was imported to the Netherlands from the US in the early 1990s and revised and adapted by the IPP several times. In 1995/96 it was adapted to the local systems of Germany, Lithuania and Estonia. In 2006 a training seminar took place in the Netherlands. Organizations from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania and Kosovo (among them the Politeia members GONG from Croatia and Association pro Democratia from Romania) received a training at the IPP office in Amsterdam to be able to implement ‘Find your way in local government’ in their own countries. As a success story we might for sure identify the realization of ‘Find your way in local government’ in 2006 and 2007 in the city of Rijeka, Croatia. There ‘Find your way in local government’ will be an annual activity in the future.

For the year 2008 the IPP plans to look for further possibilities to export the method to other countries. We have two ways to spread the method via municipalities or via NGO’s, which are interested like the IPP to organize such an Action Day in a municipality. Dutch municipalities which have twin-town relations with other municipalities in Europe might integrate ‘Find your way in local government’ in one of their Town Twinning activities. Another possibility might offer the contact to the European platform of New Towns (EPNT).

The Slovenian Politeia partner, the Youth Center of Dravinja Valley announced already its interest in such a project for the future.

So if you and your organization are interested in ‘Find your way in local politics’ please let us know. If you know other organizations you think they might be interested or if you have any contact to people working in municipalities in your home country who might be interested in a project like this, please tell them about ‘Find your way in local politics’.

Tatjana Meijvogel-Volk, Institute for Political Participation

This article was published in Politeia Newsletter 48 - February 2008