Article by NOA FO-Aarhus

Join us for a look inside the Future Citizens workshop for young stakeholders in Denmark

In the Future Citizens project one of the most important activities so far has been to gather the young Future Citizens of Europe and show them what we have come up with in the projects in order to find out if we are on the right track or not.

Who are the Future Citizens?

In Denmark we conducted a workshop on November 1st with ten people who were interested in learning what this project was all about.

In the recruiting process we joined forces with Mellemfolkeligt Smavirke, a Danish NGO with many years experience in youth work and community work both locally and internationally.

The basis for the workshop

The Workshop has two main objectives. One was to validate the Citizen Competences that we have selected for the CitizenComp. To this end we asked the young people to go through 3 of the Citizen Competencies, the others being targeted by other workshops in the other partner countries. The second objective was to brainstorm on the main challenges facing young people today, to be used as the basis for the Urban Game to be developed later in the project.

Validation of the Citizen Competences.

The Citizen Comp contains 14 different competences that have been selected on the basic of the four EU “Comps”: EntreComp, designed to foster entrepreneurship skills, LifeComp, focusing on lifelong learning, DigComp, addressing digital competence, and GreenComp, emphasising environmental sustainability, provided invaluable insights. In the Danish workshop we focused on the following competences:

• Adaptability and Flexibility
• Initiative Taking and Visioning

We asked the participants to go through all of the learning outcomes of these competences – the “Can-do-statements” – to let us know if they could relate to them, if they felt that they were indeed important and also if they agreed with the statements at all.

It is crucial to the relevance of this new CitizenComp that the future Citizens themselves can understand and relate to the competences, so these ratings and comments are very important and will be worked into the final version of the CitizenComp.

After this process the participants created an idea map for each of the competences and they came up with additional “Can-do-statements” that felt personal and relevant to them. These statements will also be incorporated into the final CitizenComp.

What are the biggest challenges for Future Citizens?

In this part of the workshop we opened up for a brainstorm session to find the main challenges that young people are experiencing. Of course this process has totally different results based on the country, region, city and people participating, so we have conducted the brainstorming in each of the partner countries.

In the Danish workshop we generated a lot of different ideas. These were clustered into topics, and then voted on by the participants. The three main challenges were then described and put into real life scenarios that can serve as vital inspiration for our Urban Game.

The full list of challenges will be used by the talented Game developers at Pot in Pot in Italy as the basis for the game topics.