Final event "My Future, Our Society"

On 8 May 2019, the P&V Foundation organised a conference at 10 am in Brussels to conclude its extensive research and action programme on collective action of young people.

Program

P&V Foundation president Olivier Servais addresses a packed audience at BOZAR during the closing event of Foundation P&V’s multi-year project "My Future, Our Society" on collective action of young people. In the morning, several inspiring speakers shared their practical experiences with the audience.

In the afternoon, the eight laureates of our call to projects and several partner organisations presented their results in various workshops.

For more information about the workshops, clic here.

After an intermezzo of The Troubadours and the possibility to visit the Next Generation, Please! exhibition in Bozar, a debate on the revitalisation of collective action among young people took place.

Discover the complete program of our final event.

Discover the video about the event.

The speakers

Pepijn Kennis

Toestand non-profit

Coordinator and driving force behind the non-profit Toestand, which aims to reactivate forgotten or abandoned buildings and (public) spaces by means of dialogue, creation, autonomy and action from local (young) residents. Toestand recently received the Ultima for social cultural work

Click here for the powerpoint presentation.

Julie Foulon

MolenGeek, Girleek

Founder of Girleek, a platform to inspire women and empower them into the ICT sector, and MolenGeek, a coworking space and a coding school created in Molenbeek. She recently received the Gender Award and the Global Citizenship Award for MolenGeek.

Victoria Anderica

Madrid City Council

Director of the Transparency Project in the Madrid City Council, which launched “Decide Madrid”, an online platform to facilitate direct, individual participation in the city's public affairs. Expert in access to public information, freedom of information and expression, and citizen participation.

Click here for the powerpoint presentation.

Michel Pradolini

City Pirates

Successful and socially committed entrepreneur, and founder and chairman of City Pirates, a broadly supported social project and football club. He received the Citizenship Award from the P&V Foundation in 2018.

Click here to watch the video of City Pirates.

Anne Muxel

Sciences Po Paris Professors Anne Muxel from France, Garry Pollock from the UK and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg from the Netherlands, under the moderation of journalists Han Renard and Béatrice Delvaux, debate on collective action among young people during the closing event of P&V Foundation’s multiannual project "My Future, Our Society" at BOZAR.

Professor and Research Director at the CEVIPOF (Center for Political Research at Sciences Po Paris). She coordinated various national and international projects and publications on youngsters and politics, political participation and intergenerational transmission of attitudes and practices.

Gary Pollock

Manchester Metropolitan University

Professor and Head of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has been involved in (European) research for over twenty years and is interested in using survey data to examine young people in society in terms of their social and political outlook, as well as their employment and family trajectories.

Click here for the powerpoint presentation.

Jacquelien van Stekelenburg

Université d'Amsterdam

Professor of social change and conflict at the VU University in Amsterdam. Her research interests are social movements, collective action, online and offline participation and mobilization, and motives for engaging in protest activities.

Click here for the powerpoint presentation.

Discover the complete biographies of our speakers.

Context

Only 16% of young adults believe they can rely on the political system to help them solve their problems or achieve their dreams. This feeling of political alienation was clearly present among the 2,000 young adults interviewed for the book "Beyond the Narrative of Decline" of Mark Elchardus (2015). For the most part, they rely on themselves, their family and a bit of luck.

Yet politics loses its meaning if people do not realise that having a good job, a comfortable home, a nice neighbourhood, safe streets and decent healthcare are strongly tied to collective conditions.

Therefore, the Foundation P&V launched a multi-annual project to reconcile young people with social engagement and the political system in general. The first phase was a call to organisations in the broadest sense of the word (non-profits, schools, de facto associations, …) that work with and for young people and are able to coordinate a project that brings young people together to find a solution to a problem they are experiencing or to realise a dream within the areas of work, housing, health, sport, etc.

Our general aim: make young people aware that through collective action and starting dialogues with (local) authorities and public institutions, they can solve personal problems or achieve their dreams. We also hope to encourage political institutions to be more responsive to young people's problems and dreams.

By October 2016 we had received 137 candidatures. A jury of experts selected eight laureates which received a grant and were monitored for one year and a half. Four projects come from Flanders (J100, Cachet, EW32 and Vrienden van de Put), two from Brussels (Scouts des Marolles and Ades) and two from Wallonia (Couleur Café asbl and Maison de Jeunes de Jalhay-Sart).

Since the start of our project, various conferences and debates have been organised, projects have been supported and progress has been made. To conclude “My Future, Our Society” we will bring together the different laureates of the call to organisations, invite several inspiring speakers – each specialised in a particular field regarding collective action – and organize multiple workshops.

With this final event we wanted to present the experiences of the 8 best practices and our whole project, as well as bring together researchers, experts, field practitioners, youngsters and politicians and the broader public, from Belgium and abroad, to discuss and to identify policies that could help in the fight against political alienation of youngsters and the revitalisation of collective action in our society.

Discover the videos from the winning projects!