Trento PILOT: Start of Testing Participatory Methods – Listening to Youth

The URBAN INNO Trento Pilot deals with the topic of ‘Innovative Government‘, in particular, how to engage citizens in the development of an innovative government process/service, by testing participatory methods which ensure the direct involvement of the citizens in the Trento urban area. On this direction, the URBAN INNO Trento pilot is planning to work on different target groups.

One of these target groups is young citizens (12-15 years old), and this will be developed in collaboration with the ‘Tavolo Coordinamento Giovani’ (involving 7 different representatives of local civil society) coordinated by Polo Sociale S.Giuseppe-S.Chiara (local office of Comune of Trento in charge to apply social policies).

The first participatory event was organized at June 8th 2017, hosted by the Cooperativa ALISEI in Trento. The event involved 15 young citizens, engaged directly by the Oratorio San Pietro (a civil society association directly involved). The event is part of the Wow my neighborhood project, which aims to improve the quality of life in the neighborhood where they live or still attend. The main goal was to find with them a feasible project for the better neighborhood. The evening was divided into 4 steps:

  1. Project introduction, problem identification and requirements
  2. Interaction for understanding what might be the points of interest
  3. Collection of possible proposals 
  4. Division into groups and selection of a common proposal

In the last step, the participants were settled into two separate rooms and were given post-its with ideas from the other group. Each group was joined by a coordinator. The objective was to converge on a particular proposal.

The experiment get some results: at least 2 ideas were collected and developed about interesting usage of public areas - one about sport activities, the other about cultural activities. In both proposals the participants were interested to get directly involved in project implementation.

MORE ABOUT TRENTO PILOT

Trento PILOT: Listening to Youth

Activity is starting, Maria Serena (Professional Educator - Comune di Trento) explains the rules to young participants