2022 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"
16th Edition
Rio de Janeiro: Innovation Laboratory for Sociopolitical Mediation of Carioca Youth (Lab.JUV-RIO)
The Special Secretariat for Youth Carioca (JUV-RIO), linked to the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro, understanding the absence of spaces for active participation of young people with the public power, seeks, through the Generation Transformation Program, to provide a set of actions, partnerships and projects aimed at promoting well-being and encouraging the participation of young people from Rio de Janeiro in the creation of solutions to guarantee their rights based on innovation and the strengthening of their leading role. Thus, the Innovation Laboratory for Sociopolitical Mediation of Carioca Youth (Lab.JUV-RIO) was born. Based on the learning relationship and horizontal practice, the laboratory intends to decentralize the action of the public power and insert young people from all regions of the city into spaces for exchange and construction of democratized sociopolitical debates.
Understanding the importance of young people's participation in governmental spaces, as stated in Article 4 of the 2013 Youth Statute, Lab.JUV-RIO, anchored in the Transformative Generation Program, aims to encourage the participation of young people in Rio in the construction of sociopolitical narratives, this being a priority measure for Latin American and Caribbean nations, according to Art. 8 of the Montevideo Consensus on Population and Development, to which Brazil is a signatory.
The proposal of the Innovation Laboratory for Sociopolitical Mediation of the Carioca Youth (Lab.JUV-RIO) is so necessary in a city that has 24% of its population aged between 15 and 29 years. Throughout the construction of this project, we considered different “youths” because we understand that young people are plural, each with their respective realities, trajectories and experiences. Therefore, it would be a loss in the analysis to think of youth as one, without reflecting the particularities of youth, expanding, in this sense, the effectiveness of JUV-RIO's actions.
Thinking about a management that recognizes social education as one of the main ways to strengthen the debate on political and social construction, being able to rescue youth and reduce inequalities, this laboratory proposes to use the concept of “mediation” as an innovation. However, this term would not be represented from the point of view of mediating conflicts and interests of young people, but would be, in contrast, an attribution to the Secretariat, which would have as its main functions to organize, stimulate, question and bring together the ideas of youth. Thus, in partnership with the designated Social Organization (OS), JUV-RIO will work to integrate the demands and experiences of the young population of our city with the management guidelines in which we are a part, creating a space for training and mutual learning.
Thus, Lab.JUV-RIO's main innovative character is to encourage the deployment of existing problems and solutions in the city in collaboration with youth, deconstructing the idea of a laboratory that only explores experiences to generate data.
As a final product, the project will include, in three editions, 225 young people from different areas of the City of Rio de Janeiro, as well as a diagnosis of youth participation, understanding the knowledge acquired by the project participants, aiming to understand young people as agents of social transformation.
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