The European Union announced that 2022 will be the European Year of Youth. Let’s see how Europe has already been promoting and engaging young people.
During the past weeks, youth has become one of the most discussed topics in Europe. First, the EU Youth Conference took place in Maribor, Slovenia at the end of September (26 – 30, 2021), the final conference in the frame of the 8th Cycle of the EU Youth Dialogue. The EU Youth Dialogue is a forum that aims to connect young people and youth organisations with policy makers, experts, researchers and all relevant civil society actors. This current cycle ran from the second half of 2020 to the end of 2021, involving the German, Portuguese and Slovenian EU Presidencies. This final conference was focused on the European Youth Goal #9 ‘Space and participation for all’ and participants were able to bring recommendations focused on its implementation. In the end, twenty recommendations concerning seven concrete targets were presented at the end of the forum. As an example, we can see that under the third target ‘ensure youth participation in elections and representation in election bodies’, one of the recommendations is to install a symbolic voting process for non-voting age groups. This will help the younger generation learn about legislative procedures and become active citizens once they reach the voting age in their countries. Another recommendation in this field is that ‘member states should provide quality citizenship education in schools’, in order for students to become more confident in political issues. The results of the conference will be taken into consideration in the EU Youth Dialogue Council Resolution to be adopted by the EU Council of Youth Ministers in late November 2021.
The European Youth Event (EYE2021) took place a few weeks later, on 4 and 8 – 9 October 2021. Here, 10’000 young people met virtually and in Strasbourg to help shape the future of Europe. EYE2021 was one of the main events of the European Parliament’s (EP) youth consultation process for the Conference on the Future of Europe. Since May 2021, the EP has actively taken young people’s idea into consideration via their website and the top 20 most influential ideas have been collected into the Youth ideas report. Two ideas are directly related to education, youth, culture and sport. The first is to improve non-formal education in schools: the EU should provide more funding to make non-formal education accessible to all students. Non-formal education can be thought of in many different ways: voluntary services, youth exchanges or sports programmes. The second idea is to rethink school curricula. European schools should start to offer practical education linked to life in the contemporary world, such as mental health awareness, sex education, digital and financial literacy, environmental education and intercultural skills. Acquiring knowledge in these fields can help Europeans connect easier, help build empathy and finally bring Europe closer together.
Continuing in the month, on 14 October 2021, the Commission adopted a report on the implementation of the EU Youth Strategy between 2019 and 2021. The EU Youth Strategy is the framework for EU youth policy cooperation for 2019 – 2027 and is based on the Council Resolution of 26 November 2018. It strives to engage, connect and empower young people in democratic life, civic engagement and in general in society. The strategy uses effective instruments and tools like the previously mentioned EU Youth Dialogue, the European Youth Portal and the EU Youth Coordinator. The report shows that the COVID-19 pandemic was very hard on young people. To help this, the EU has reinforced its support measures under initiatives like the European Education Area (EEA), the European Skills Agenda and the Youth Employment Support package. In addition, as we can see with the aforementioned events, the EU is trying to involve the youth more actively in policymaking.
To make youth an even bigger priority, the EP and the Council of Europe have announced that 2022 will be the European Year of Youth. President von der Leyen had previously announced this during her State of the Union speech on 15 September 2021. The overall objective of the European Year of Youth is to intensify the efforts of the Union, Member States, regional and local authorities to highlight the strength of youth people in a post-pandemic society, support them and engage in active dialogue with them.