Active Citizenship: Enhancing political participation of migrant youth (ACCESS) -project aimed to promote young people’s willingness to participate in social and political debates and to improve opportunities for youth participation and empowerment. During the project, ACCESS trained four young people from migrant backgrounds in each city to act as peer mentors for other young people. It involved five European cities, Helsinki, Cluj Napoca, Prague (Region 14), Marseille and Barcelona.
Finnish Youth Research Society was responsible for designing (pdf file) and facilitating the peer review action. This assessed how participation systems and practices in municipalities take into account and involve young people from a migrant background. In the peer evaluation, each city participating in the project was evaluated by representatives of the other four cities, a representative of the youth department of each city and a young peer counsellor. In each city, young people, city officials and politicians, representatives of organisations and immigrant communities were interviewed. On the basis of the interviews, the peer evaluators expressed their views on the city’s weaknesses, strengths and good practices and made suggestions for improvement.
The project was commissioned by IOM Helsinki, funded by the European Union and led by Outi Lepola.
- Start year:
- 2014
- End year:
- 2015