Acts of Young People

"Acts of Young People (ACTS)" is a Transnational Structured Dialogue conference which is going to take place on the 25th - 29th April 2017 in Cyprus. The objective of this project is to foster active citizenship and encourage civic participation at local, national and EU level. Especially, the project aims to embolden and inspire young people in their ability to participate actively in society in line with the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty; and to stimulate the development of participatory democracy of young people.

The activities foreseen in this project have two phases: First, consultations with young people in the form of questionnaires, with a view to find out their needs on matters relating to participation in democratic life. Second, a conference/meeting between young people where decision-makers/youth experts will be invited to talk about the theme of participation in democratic life. In the second phase, our aim is to conclude to a set of concrete recommendations which can be used in national and/or European level.

With this project, we can show young people and policy makers that there are a lot of ways in participatory democracy; and explain how we, as active citizens, can change the system with a bottom-up approach. This way, we can stimulate debate about the obstacles that prevent people from fully using these rights and encourage them to participate.

The final objective is to produce a policy paper in order to forward it to the policy makers at national and European level with the view to be used for future policy making in the field of participatory democracy, active citizenship and youth. Therefore, these recommendations can be included into the agendas of European leaders (i.e. National representatives at ministerial level and/or Members of the European Parliament) in order to urge them to look at the issue of absenteism in active citizenship and participatory democracy of young people more seriously; and possibly to propose laws that are more inclusive of youth.  These actions will empower young people to be more active and step forward.