Practice what you preach: how networks can benefit from participatory democracy
/By Maria Lucien, Program Associate
Members of the Youth Democracy Cohort (YDC), a global network of 700+ organisations advocating for young people's inclusion in public decision-making, just decided on the work their network will take on over the next year to advance youth participation worldwide, through an open participatory process called YDC Participates on the civic tech platform Decidim.
For the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD), the Brussels-based network of democracy support organizations which chairs the YDC, the pilot was a challenging undertaking. This would be the first time the team would run a process like this using a civic tech platform to engage their members. That's where People Powered came in. We've run this experiment on ourselves and iterated over the years since our inception in 2019. In that time, People Powered Decides has determined the allocation of over USD 700,000 and resulted in 27 funded projects. Some of these projects persist to this day, like the Rising Stars mentorship program and our annual in-person convening.
Together with our partners at Digidem Lab, we worked with EPD to set up YDC Participates and design the process end to end: what members could propose, how ideas would be refined into proposals, and how the final decision would be made over three months. Despite initial concerns, the response from the YDC community was enthusiastic – within the first two weeks of the platform’s launch, nearly 300 members registered on the platform and over 100 ideas were submitted. The team notes that they were struck most by the “genuine willingness of YDC members to be involved”, a positive signal that members had “a real appetite for participatory governance within the network”.
Through a series of workshops with members run by the team at EPD and with help from the YDC Steering Committee to combine and refine ideas, the final 44 proposals were sent to ballot, during which each member was allotted one vote to select their priority proposal for each category: CSO support, advocacy and support.. At the end of the process, members finally decided on the following proposals for each category:
🏆 CSO Support | Lab4Youth: Micro-Grants for Youth CSOs
Create an experimentation lab with micro-grants for youth CSOs to enable youth organisations –particularly those with grassroots origins and connections– to test, fund, and share small-scale democratic initiatives across the world.
🏆 Advocacy | YDC Speaks on Change Podcast
This podcast will provide a platform for members to share their experiences with democratic challenges, digital rights, and inclusive participation. It will create a space to discuss how youth navigate exclusion, assert their digital and civic rights, and collectively strategize to strengthen youth voices in governance.
🏆 Research | Post-Election Youth Engagement Study
Across many democracies, youth engagement peaks during election cycles and declines sharply once results are announced. This study asks what happens to young people after the vote is cast: it will examine how participation evolves in the post-election period, pilot in a diverse set of countries, and produce policy recommendations members can carry into their own support and advocacy.
Key lessons
For EPD, the winning ideas were a clear diagnosis: the team says they “paint a clear picture of where members feel the gaps are”. That being said, running a process like this is never frictionless, and the team is candid about what they’d tell a network interested in doing something similar.
Invest real time upfront in understanding how each stage of the process will play out on the platform well before its launch.
Give the proposal development segment of the process more time – this is often the most engaging stage and benefits from more time for members to refine and collaborate on richer proposals.
Start early on outreach – getting members to register and prepare themselves early sets up for more engagement during the process.
So what comes next for the team? They’re working on defining a work plan for next year, with plans to continue involving membership at key points throughout implementation. Crucially, this is not the end of member participation for EPD; the team plans to carry these learnings into future iterations of YDC Participates.
Thinking of running a process like this with your own network? Get in touch with us! The digital platform ratings, guide, and Digital Participation Playbook can help you learn more about using a digital platform for your process.