Youth participation means having the opportunity to influence matters that affect you and to take part in developing your community and society. For young people, this means having space to be heard, the opportunity to participate in decision-making, and the ability to implement their own ideas and influence their own lives.
Participation is also about a sense of belonging—to a family, a group of friends, a class, a municipality, Finland, and even humanity. Its opposite is loneliness and exclusion.
Youth Academy promotes participation by supporting adults who work with young people and influence their lives and living conditions, and by creating meaningful opportunities for young people to participate and be active in ways that matter to them and to society.
Our approach is based on interaction: we strengthen young people’s communication skills and adults’ capacity to work with young people.
At the core of participation lies in seeing young people as active participants and experts in their own lives, not merely as objects of action or passive participants (so-called “to-be-included”).
Functional participation
Practical participation can be divided into two complementary forms:
- Representative (political) participation, which emphasizes various youth influence groups, such as youth councils and student bodies.
- Functional (social) participation, which emphasizes interactive and activity-based methods.
Youth Academy’s work is fundamentally based on using, developing, and training interactive and activity-based methods.
The goal of functional participation is to involve as many young people as possible in discussions, especially those whose voices are not usually heard. This is best achieved through facilitative methods.
Functional participation requires a safe and equal atmosphere as well as democratic practices.