For one week, Ogulin became a European space for discussion on civic participation, youth activism, and community engagement. Through workshops, exchanges, and hands-on activities, youth workers and activists from ten countries shared experiences, tools, and questions about how young people can truly make an impact in their communities.
From March 23rd to 30th, together with other youth workers and activists from across Europe Europe (Italy, Spain, Latvia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, North Macedonia, Portugal, and Czech Republic), we had the privilege of gathering for an intense training experience about how to participate actively in civic monitoring: Civic X-Ray, organissed by LAG Vallis Collapis. Through teamwork, discussions and practical activities, we explored what active participation in civil society truly means and looks like. We reflected on youth work as a powerful tool that supports young people in raising their voices, making decisions and taking effective action within their communities. We then dived into civic monitoring, discovering how data, information and community voices can be transformed into meaningful stories that highlight issues, raise questions and offer new perspectives. In the final stages, we connected tools and ideas to our local realities: by mapping needs, resources, and challenges we developed concrete action plans that we can now activate together with young people. Civic X-Ray was a journey of learning, collaboration and awareness that left us with valuable tools and fresh ideas to bring back to our communities.
Upon our return from Croatia, we brought back the practices and experiences acquired during Civic X-Ray to Palermo and our hometowns thanks to a small meeting with the Maghweb team and the elaboration and dissemination of a survey about our peers’ experiences and knowledge of the EU and its opportunities. We then shared this survey with over 70 young people from our community to explore young people’s interest in international experiences, their awareness of the European mobility programme and the main obstacles that may prevent them from taking part.
The majority of respondents belonged to the 19–24 age group, which represents 85.7% of the sample. Most participants were university students, accounting for 77.9% of responses, while smaller groups include part-time workers, people looking for employment, secondary school students and full-time workers. In terms of gender, the majority of respondents identify as women, followed by men, with a small number selecting non-binary, other, or preferring not to answer. Young people expressed a high level of interest in experiences abroad, indeed almost 8 out of 10 respondents said they would be interested in travelling for new experiences and only a small minority said they were not interested. Most respondents want to go abroad to discover new cultures and realities, to learn or improve language skills, to improve their CV and to meet new people. At the same time they face economic and linguistic barriers, don’t know the procedures well and are afraid of falling behind with their studies. In fact, awareness of international programmes is very varied: Erasmus+ for school and university is very well known, with 96.1% of respondents saying they had heard of it; awareness of Erasmus+ youth exchanges is also relatively high at 68.8%. However, other programmes are much less familiar: only around one in five respondents had heard of the European Solidarity Corps or DiscoverEU.
Finally, the survey showed strong demand for further information. 61% of respondents said they would like to learn more and another 29.9% answered “maybe”. Only 9.1% said they were not interested. This means that the vast majority of participants are either clearly interested or potentially open to discovering more about international mobility opportunities.
We are pleased with this first experience of civic monitoring and feel that it will open up EU opportunities to more of our peers!
