Defining the goals and scope of your project
For your 'Co-Creating Our City' project to be successful, it is essential to start with a shared understanding of what success looks like. Establishing clear objectives and guardrails early on can help you use time effectively and drive towards concrete outcomes and impact at city level.
This involves setting concrete objectives for your project:
- Are you aiming to solve a specific policy issue or impact one policy area, such as sustainability, transport, or housing?
- Or is the goal to develop new solutions for and strengthen youth engagement in city governance overall?
Clarifying the scope of potential solutions early on is important to connect with the most relevant people within your city and to drive impact and avoid disappointment when it comes to the implementation of suggested solutions. It also ensures that the project is designed with the right scale, scope, and stakeholders in mind.
Establishing a theory of change for your 'Co-Creating Our City' project can be a powerful tool at this stage: a theory of change helps articulate how and why a project like 'Co-Creating Our City' is expected to lead to the desired change. Your theory of change should outline, concretely for your city or community, the change you expect to see, what activities and partnerships are needed to achieve that change, the assumptions that need to be met, and how progress will be measured.
Imagining the change you want to see
Consider these potential outcomes for your 'Co-Creating Our City' project:
- A concrete solution to an issue (e.g., sustainability, transport, or housing) that takes into account young people's needs and views
- New processes to communicate with or solicit ideas from young residents
- A youth newsletter or multimedia segment
- A new program for youth engagement or new youth engagement strategy
- A recurring peer research program for young people in the city
- New opportunities to increase transparency on city functions that impact youth
- Pathways to participate in or engage with departments and city staff
In addition to defining the scope and goals, you may also want to consider and discuss the project's long-term potential with stakeholders. Will this be a one-off initiative, is it designed to be a pilot for a recurring program, or the start of a permanent youth or citizen advisory body within the city? Thinking through these possibilities early can help shape the project's structure, resource needs, and sustainability.
It is also good to do a landscape scan of what already exists for participatory opportunities in a city. There may already be some structures for ongoing youth engagement, but the questions are:
- To what extent do existing programs appeal to youth needs and vision for the community?
- To what extent do youth get to use these spaces to shape outcomes?
- To what extent do they feel as though their contributions are having an impact?