Youth PB Accelerator

Participatory budgeting (PB) gives young people an ideal opportunity to experience democratic mechanisms at the local level. Unlike participation in local or parliamentary elections, in many countries it is possible to participate before reaching adulthood (which for most countries in Europe happens at the age of 18), which allows young people to experience what it means to have a say in the spending of public funds and to have a real impact on their neighbourhood. PB in schools is not common in Europe, and there are similarly few examples of youth participatory budgeting at the local authority level. One reason for this is the lack of adequate civic education, both in schools and in the form of informal education. There is currently a lack of structured models and classroom materials to deliver PB which holds back its growth, thus why teachers and educators in both formal and informal settings currently lack the skills or resources to use PB as an educational tool. Therefore, the project responded to the need to provide attractive, high-quality educational materials to youth workers to integrate the topic of participatory budgeting into their daily work and ultimately increase the social participation of young people.

The main goal of the "Youth PB Accelerator" project was to increase the involvement of young people in formal and informal democratic institutions and strengthen their rights by providing tools and ready-made solutions that would help create more effective methods to support the participation of young people in public decision-making in the local community.
The specific aim of the project was to develop the capacities and competences of youth workers, in particular teachers and educators, in the implementation and use of participatory budgeting as a tool for civic education.
Through analysis of best practices and methods of youth education based on municipal tools for participatory democracy and school participatory budgets, we developed a coherent model for involving young people in participatory budgeting. By providing this model, we wanted to make an impact by enabling young people to participate in democratic processes in Europe. All in all, the project provided attractive and ready-to-use educational materials that can be used by all youth workers interested in the topic of civic participation.

The main activities included developing educational materials for educators and teachers that would allow them to work with young people on school and youth participatory budgeting. The first step in developing the guide/toolkit was the research on good practices from countries in Europe and around the world, collected and described extensively in the good practices map on the website. It was followed by the writing of the first manuscripts of the guide/toolkit, which covered issues related to the inclusion of young people in the PB process