— 01 / The project
Voices in Action is a fourteen-month Erasmus+ KA154 youth participation project, designed to move young people from feeling unheard to becoming heard — and from being told about democracy to practicing it.
— Our vision
We don't speak for the next generation. We help the next generation speak. — Voices in Action · Strategic Plan
We believe civic participation is a craft, not a slogan. It is learned in the doing: by mapping the streets you actually walk, by telling stories no policy paper will tell for you, by sitting opposite someone from another country and discovering that the question you came to ask is also theirs.
This project equips 120+ young people, aged 16 to 25, from Malta, Hungary and Turkey, with the practical tools of civic life — digital storytelling, advocacy design, policy simulation, intercultural dialogue — and the platforms to use them.
It does so in deliberate partnership with youth who are too often spoken over: those from migrant and refugee backgrounds, socio-economically disadvantaged young people, and those who carry the everyday weight of being underrepresented in their own democracies.
— Five strategic objectives
Voice
Capacity-building workshops, interactive trainings and digital storytelling labs that give participants real, practiced knowledge — not abstract civic theory — about how democratic processes work and how their voice fits inside them.
Inclusion
Through co-design with young people themselves, dedicated access support, and selection criteria that actively reach the under-reached: migrants, refugees, rural youth, and the 47% who currently say they feel excluded from participatory platforms.
Literacy
Because advocacy lives where young people already live — on phones, in feeds, in short video. We equip participants to use digital and social media not as consumers, but as authors of their own civic narratives.
Capacity
Transnational exchange so that the three partner organisations — and through them, dozens of youth workers — leave the project with new methodologies, new tools, and new contacts that outlive the funding.
Network
Local and international youth forums, designed to keep talking to each other after the closing ceremony in Malta — so the manifesto we sign together has somewhere to live.
— Themes
Voices in Action is rooted in the EU Youth Dialogue and the European Youth Goals. Across the fourteen months these themes braid through every workshop, every story, every campaign.
— What the research told us
From the project's cross-country needs analysis (Malta · Hungary · Turkey, 2025). Each number on this page is a young person, somewhere, telling us something is missing.
…of young people in the three countries feel under-represented in political and social decision-making.
…express limited confidence in their ability to influence social issues that affect them.
…feel excluded from participatory platforms because of socio-economic or cultural barriers.
…of youth surveyed in Turkey say freedom of expression is restricted in their everyday lives.
…of youth organisations report a clear need for training in digital storytelling and advocacy.
…of young people asked us, first and foremost, for the chance to develop leadership skills.
Source · Annex 02 · Need Analysis · Youth Civic Expression & Participation Under Democratic Strain.
— Alignment
Voices in Action speaks directly to five European Youth Goals — Youth Participation in Democratic Life, Social Inclusion & Equality, Sustainable Development, Digital Transformation, and Youth Wellbeing — and to the priorities of the EU Youth Dialogue.
It is co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ programme, administered by the European Union Programmes Agency (MT01) in Malta. Total grant: € 52,244.
See it in practice →