everyday social democracy

Engaging campaigning groups to bring activists together

In practice, we have engaged youth leaders across the progressive movement (from labour clubs to student unions, from single issue groups to trade unions) to jointly facilitate or sponsor activities but also work together at enabling young people who are excluded from politics to get involved.

We attract new members through an agile and personalised approach, targeting progressive audiences and encouraging our existing members to help in this recruitment drive. Using online tools (such as our website and other social networking tools, such as Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, and Netvibes), we have increased our reach to about 700 young people, many of whom are community organisers.

Telling your stories to inspire young people

Attracting these people has led us to attract youth leaders to participate in telling their stories of youth activism to generate a buzz about the “Living in the 21st century” ideas competition we will be launching in September. These range from youth & student clubs of the labour movement home (Labour Clubs & NUS) and abroad (i.e. PSOE, PS, PASOK, SPA ECOSY, IUSY, PES), but also social entrepreneurs & campaigners (Amnesty, Oxfam, CSV, Searchlight).

Listening to you to track causes and campaigns

We have been listening in to the conversations taking place online through our personalised listening service, reaching out beyond the activity of our own blog and finding out what are the issues being discussed by other bloggers and what are the campaigns being developed by other online activists. As this available to everyone, young people can also get informed about the issues and get involved in the debate.

We have also been asking our members the issues that matter to them and activities that excited them. Given that the top issues that mattered to our members were equality, international relations & citizenship/integration, we have focused our events on these themes. Given that the top skills members were interested in were writing articles/guides, campaigning and lobbying politicians we are developing activities around these. You can still tell us the issues that matter to you here.

Attracting funding to organise activities for you

• create ideas and actions that change the world around you
• develop your skills and turn your ideas into action
• organise and champion the campaigns you can get involved in