YUPAD project continues to advance by Igor Jojkic | igor.jojkic@gmail.com
UBC is a part of project consortium for the YUPAD project (YoUth PArticipatory budgets empowering young people using big Data). The project aims to enable young people to understand, practice, and influence participatory budgets across European cities. The project will build the capacity of educators and local authorities to implement participatory budgeting and increase civic participation among the youth. The first transnational partner meeting was held in Brussels on 30-31 May 2022. All ten partners from nine countries (Belgium, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Austria) met together to discuss further steps in the project implementation. The meeting also served to present “YUPAD recipes” a series of collected examples of good practices regarding participatory budgeting. These examples aimed to present the bad, the good, and the great examples of youth participatory budgets. During the event in Brussels, YUPAD Fair was organized to showcase these examples and created videos on a set of promising practices from the “recipes”. The examples of participatory budgeting from UBC Member Cities were presented on YUPAD Fair including concrete mechanisms for youth people engagement in shaping city budgets particularly from Gdynia, Helsinki, Turku, Gdansk, Jyväskylä. UBC also has been in charge for project communication both internal and external. For that purpose the Communication and Dissemination Plan was developed and shared with partners. The aim of this document is to establish and
run the visibility and communication infrastructure of the project, so that all activities carried out during the project lifetime are widely communicated with the highest possible visibility in the partners’ countries and beyond – across the EU. Regarding the dissemination aspect, the project is embedded in a strong partnership of organisations with wide networks and “circuits of influence”, that can guarantee a wide system of contacts for a successful dissemination of project news, events and results. Concerning the exploitation aspect, when the project comes to its end, specific measures will ensure that results are still available for usage by different groups. Next steps in the project implementation are related to development of YUPAD Calculator, a tailored platform that gathers input from young people on policy priorities, expected outcomes and their preferences for concrete projects in a city. This phase envisages communication related to newly created YUPAD curricula for educators and policy makers that aim to provide an essential guide to understanding of youth participatory budgets including promising practices and new tools. Once the educators and policy makers got on board, YUPAD bees methodology will be the second step in creation of the system that provides the methodology for development of concrete projects or initiatives suggested within the calculator. We trust in our work, working together!
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