Testing the YUPAD Tools in Austria

The YUPAD project has been very busy in the last couple of months in Austria. As a first step, all relevant documents have been translated into German – the YUPAD recipes, the training materials, and curricula, the YUPAD methodology as well as the YUPAD calculator.

 

On 15 March 2023 the YUPAD training for policy makers was organised. The 9 training participants were very keen to learn about participatory youth budgets. They discussed different funding possibilities and compared different ways of organising participatory youth budgets in Austria. They all agreed that participatory youth budgets are an important instrument to increase civic participation of youth.

 

On April 21st,2023 the first group of youth tested the YUPAD Calculator. For everyone it was exciting to see the priority topics of these young people. It turned out that for them the priorities are sport, youth mobility, health, and wellbeing. Based on these findings, they developed projects which could be funded under participatory youth budgets. One of these projects was an activist youth action to travel by train to Vienna and demand from the Government free train tickets for youth from and to the capital.

 

In total, 88 Austrian youth tested the YUPAD Calculator by now and in three schools project ideas for participatory youth budgets have been developed.

 

On 3 July 2023, 10 Austrian educators participated in the YUPAD training. These educators were particularly interested in how to integrate sustainability and climate justice into the school system through participatory youth budgets.