The PADIGE project proposes a bottom-up approach, in order to involve more youths in shaping the future of legislation in the EU on gender equality. Hence, the project aims at providing young people and youth workers with information as well as helping them in the development of the required skills for the design of ECI proposals. The use of participatory design as a method to collaborate is expected to engage and motivate young people and create long term impact on their involvement in public policy.
The specific objectives of the project are:
- To raise the awareness about the European Citizens Initiative as an instrument of European “direct democracy”.
- To provide high quality training on the methodology of Participatory Design for ECI, by creating a Guide for Youth Workers that will help them into successfully implementing this idea into their pupils, which will later take form through a wiki platform.
- To raise awareness among young people about the importance of Gender Equality.
- To have an impact on the EU law creation by presenting a new proposal based on the concept of Participatory Design.
Results
To respond to the above-mentioned objectives, the project has developed :
- a platform that will allows young people to share ideas with like-minded and in which ECI proposals can be co-written and implemented by youths from different European countries through a participatory design methodology. It will also include informational material on Gender Equality and a forum where all users can discuss various aspects of the subject
- a Guide for Youth Workers which will contain a blended learning course, combining asynchronous and synchronous learning which will aim at training youths on how to apply participatory design methodology into preparing a European Citizens Initiative on the topic of Gender Equality. Additionally, it will create guidelines, methods, and advice on how Youth Workers can successfully transfer this knowledge to young people
- a dissemination plan to raise awareness about the role of the ECI (European Citizens Initiative) in the European Union law framework. PADIGE project will allow young people to easily have access to a “direct democracy” instrument.
Background
The partnership is composed of 6 partners from 5 different European countries, namely France, Greece, Latvia, Italy and Spain. Each one of them have been selected for their general involvement in Youth related issues and activities, showing a special commitment to promote innovation, improvement of social conditions and equality, youth participation and involvement, mobility and international collaboration and so forth, as well as for their reckoning of the importance of education and informal training.