Community Safety through Youth Participation at local level

forthcoming

Fireworks being set off at emergency services during the New Year transition, rioting youths following a (fake) message on social media, a peaceful demonstration against a government decision that gets out of hand... These acts of (counter)participation, opposing government measures, occur everywhere in Europe. We must not look away from these phenomena and not (let) exclude ‘counter-movers’ from society. On the contrary, the signals from ‘counter-movers’, together with these of ‘silent’ non-participating citizens, must be (re)formulated, understood and included in democratic decision-making processes. Combined with the greatly increased uncertainties and multiple crises in a changing global world, especially young people are vulnerable to counter- and/or non-participation. Therefore, COSY’s primary target group are youngsters between 15 and 29 years in all their diversity, in particular young people at risk of being excluded by society/ institutionally. Outreach youth workers, local policy-makers, and representatives of government institutions are the secondary target groups, because they are the core actors needed to realise COSY’s overall aim to create a lasting culture of active democratic youth participation. Based on a thorough needs analysis, COSY’s specific focus is on (re)building local community safety, through innovative methods of flip-thinking and co-approaches. By using a Most Different Systems Design, methods and action models for solution-oriented co-production will be developed and tested in 8 selected ecosystems that differ maximally regarding their size (from rural, over towns and urbanising municipalities, to the Netherlands’ capital) and the diversity among the intermediaries (outreach youth workers from a plethora of different (types of) organisations and representatives of different government institutions). That way the COSY deliverables are utmost transferable, as they go beyond a one-size-fits-all logic.