LOCAL REGIONAL NETWORKS FOR (MEANINGFUL) YOUTH PARTICIPATION - A practical guide for Youth organisations & Youth Workers

Aims of the tool

This guide consists of a step-by-step strategy which aims to be inspiration to youth organizations and youth workers in their work on networking for youth participation. This strategy does not intend to be a closed proposal, it intends to be inspiring and flexible for your own action instead.
Also the proposed order of these steps can sometimes be modified (for example, in the cases where a relevant youth network already exists) but, the general approach for this guide was the cases where no significant steps are already taken, and where the network will need to be created from scratch.

Description of the tool

A local/regional network for (meaningful) youth participation is the name for a instrument/mechanism that provides a stronger voice to a youth community while being a convenient vehicle for this voice to be heard and to have the respective - significant - impact in the target con-text.
Putting Youth working together at local/regional level may well be a great advantage in achieving social transformation, but it may be as well
a challenge due to different factors like diversity of stakeholders, lack of resources or support, low youth sector development, lack of recognition of the value of youth work or non formal education, cultural diversity of communities, etc. Generally, if it does not look challenging, probably there’s not a great need to create a local/regional network for (meaningful) youth participation.

This practical guide is targeting youth organisations and youth workers aiming to strengthen youth participation in their contexts through local/regional networking in the youth field. It’s an outcome of the process of creating two networks in the framework of the project “Local/regional networks for meaningful youth participation” - it results of the experience of the two contributors organizations, Dínamo (Portugal) and Il Sestante (Italy), in this field and with the collected feedback from young
people that were involved in these experiences.
It’s an attempt to help youth organisations and youth workers in their strategical work, considering that a network is generally a long-term process.
This guide is not intended to be exhaustive, it’s rather a very practical approach to networking about, with, and for young people.
Regardless of the target stakeholders of this guide, it does not mean that other social actors can’t benefit from using it, namely young people, perhaps can use it to help the ones that can help them to achieve their networking objectives.