Even though youth both influence and are affected by peace and security trends, their voices often remain unheard in multilateral settings.
What practical steps can organisations take to better foster youth inclusion?
The new OSCE practice paper ‘Working with and for youth: Practical ideas to foster youth engagement in policies, processes and programmes’ aims to provide a critical point of reference of best practices for organizations that want to improve their engagement with young people.
The paper is the culmination of our partnership with the OSCE Mission to Serbia, which we have supported since 2019 to operationalize its commitment to youth participation at the programmatic and organisational level. Reviewing existing practices across the OSCE and beyond, comprehensive guidelines on youth mainstreaming were developed and a training course conducted for other OSCE missions and national counterparts.
This Practice Paper builds on a series of roundtables that were hosted in 2021 to capture best practices in collaboration with other OSCE institutions: the Office of the Secretary General in Vienna and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw. Bringing together practitioners within and beyond the OSCE for peer-learning on operationalising youth participation and inclusion, the Practice Paper builds on their contributions with the aim of further promoting youth participation in and beyond the OSCE, to ensure peace and security issues that affect youth are addressed with youth.