Over 2005, 2006 and 2007, political youth organisations gathered in a network for political youth organisations from both sides of the Mediterranean. As a founding meeting, we organised a Contact Making Seminar in Berlin from 4^th to 8^th of December 2006.

The network aims at being a platform for political youth organisations to meet, exchange ideas, best practises and opinions and work together on the topics where we have a common aim such as peace, Human Rights and democracy, to promote the participation of young people in decision-making processes and to learn about different cultures and opinions. We believe youth participation to be a very vital topic for our network for we have found out that the possibilities for youth participation are very different in our countries but in all cases they need to be improved. In some countries, our partners have no possibility whatsoever to make the voice of young people heard and to participate in the decision-making processes, even if they directly concern young people. But we also believe that young people should be involved in all decisions, since it’s not only the budget for youth clubs that has an impact on young people, but every policy, be it on climate change or labour market, will affect young people. Still, youth organisations and young people often have no possibility to voice their concerns and we see it as our common aim to work on this and improve the situation.

We want to involve political youth organisations from both sides of the Mediterranean. As “political” we define “policies” rather than “politics”. Meaning: you don’t have to be a youth wing of a party in order to fall under our target group, as long as you do policies. We also welcome individuals to join our network: they can play an active role although the network defines itself as a network of organisations.

You can also join the FALAFEL network and be part of our mailing list to share information, discuss issues, prepare events etc by e.mailing to shay.even[AT]gmail.com and ska[AT]fyeg.org with a short description of your organisation.

This article was published by the Euromed Platform Magazine (more about that on www.euromedpl.org