Everyday participation

From time to time I bang on about the 'habit of participation' and people nod and then carry on with what they were doing.

Here perhaps is a better term, in work developed by Liverpool Youth Services.

'A culture of participation can only develop if young people are able to experience participation as a part of their everyday life and not simply as a 'one-off' event... Developed in a series of workshops held with young people, Everyday Participation emphasizes the role of youth work as a seedbed in which young people can learn the basic skills and develop the attitudes needed to enable their participation in decision-making at multiple levels. Its working principles are:

• Participation is a dialogue between adults and young people as equal partners in a process where decision-making takes place and results in change.
• A culture of participation is a climate in which young people expect to be heard and involved, where participation is something that happens every day and not a separate event or activity.
• Everyday participation integrates the aims of participation into the daily running of a youth group, making it a guiding principle of every session and every aspect of group life, not the focus of a separate initiative.

This practice emphasises the use of everyday situations in all service settings as democratic moments where young people can make experiences through their negotiation of interests.

It still makes it sound a bit special, having to take place in the running of a youth group, whereas what I'm interested in is overcoming the problem that so many people go through family and school life with very little or no experience of being involved in decision-making processes that affect them. But whether or not the principles feed down into schools and parenting classes, it's still eminently sensible.

Source: Toolkit for youth participation in urban policies, Urbact 2006.

Full practical guide here.

Comments

[Simon Blake]

I'm an advocate of your first position. Cultures contain habits, and our habits can be just that little bit more accessible to us than 'culture' can be.

I'll leave it to someone else to say it:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle