What is the key to bringing Europe closer to young people?
My answer is clear: participation.

Last Thursday I brought together 20 young people from Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Euskadi, and Navarre to discuss cohesion policies, cross-border cooperation, and multilevel governance. For a few hours, Europe stopped being an abstract concept and became debate, ideas, questions, and proposals.

This became a reality through the YOUTH BUILDING EUROPE workshop that I organized as part of my Interreg Volunteer Youth volunteering within the AFOMEF project of Interreg POCTEFA.

For those who participated, it was an opportunity to discover cross-border projects, contribute with ideas, make proposals, and above all, ask many questions.

For me, it was an opportunity to connect three areas that I have been building over the past few years: non-formal education, research in participatory communication for development, communication of European projects.

This workshop confirmed something important: young people want to participate. They just need spaces to do so.