BIcycle Culture as Youth´s Civic and sustainabLe Empowerment

2026-07-22

When it comes to political participation among youth, the situation is very alarming. According to the European Parliament Youth Survey (2021), most respondents feel they do not have much, or any, say over important decisions, laws and policies affecting them (53% regarding the policies affecting their local area, rising to 60% for their country as a whole, and to 70% for the EU as a whole). BICYCLE, our project's name, stands for BIcycle Culture as Youth´s Civic and sustainabLe Empowerment. Why? We think that working with youth on a topic they find ¨close¨ and belonging to their daily lives and struggles will help them gain the political and social empowerment we look for in our initiative. Rather than choosing a broad, and sometimes vague, concept of ¨democratic participation¨ in general, we want to work on it, and through it, via an issue that is not at all abstract to our youth. On the contrary, it is well known to them from their lives and we wish them to see that what they experience and know is valuable and connected indeed to the wider local, regional and EU policies and that they themselves can shape and influence it. Moreover, 2024 is the European Year of Cycling and European Youth Forum (2024) welcomed the commitment of the European Commission to an increased ambition of reaching a net zero policy by 2040. However, youth raised concerns regarding the target's ambition and its over-reliance on technology while ignoring the vital point of addressing the overconsumption and natural resources over-use, and we are in line with this, too. This said, our project's main actions include: -24 youth workers trained via a Training Course in France, -60 young people trained via a Youth Exchange in Spain, -36 young people completing Volunteering Programme abroad, -96 young people completing local biking routes with political advocacy in each of 6 partner countries, -36 youth workers and young people presenting our project in Brussels at the end of it, etc.

Spain

2025-10-15