The event addressed local policy makers, public administration representatives, and NGOs/Civil society organisations working with vulnerable young people.
Most of the participants had been involved in UPLIFT actions in Chemnitz before, as an elected person, representative of the public administration, or gatekeeper, therefore they had a shared interest in an implementation process for Reflexive Policy Making with and for young people, as did the team member from Chemnitz European Capital of Culture 2025 who had not been involved in UPLIFT before.
The event trained the participants in doing a personal assessment of their own participatory projects, mirroring them against the UPLIFT guidelines for Reflexive Policy Making. A presentation of the main UPLIFT tools ended with an overview of the Barakaldo youth board and the local policy co-creation and empowerment process. There were then lively group discussions about possible benefits of a formalized youth board/s for specific fields of public action. Positions that were identified to be reconsidered were that policy making reaches enough target group specification in a collaboration of the institutional and advocacy actors, and that it is more effective to include UPLIFT’s young target groups in micro-level projects. Given the composition of the workshop’s participants, the event served above all as a reflective space concerning possible gaps within participants’ strategies and networking structures for Reflexive Policy Making.