2024 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

Mi Primer Voto (My First Vote) is a Catalan-Chilean collective, politically plural and independent. Flexible, specialised, multicultural, multidisciplinary, and its members are between 19 and 67 years old. We design, plan and execute participatory/consultative processes, citizen training activities and research processes, in territories diverse in latitude, size and culture, in which minors are included in each of their phases.

We decided to start implementing these processes due to the invisibilisation of minors in decision-making on issues related to them and the poor state of citizenship education in schools, both in Spain and Chile. 

Our main activity is the consultation of adolescents, which seeks, on the one hand, to make minors' opinions visible in matters that affect/interest them and, on the other hand, to be an educational activity that collaborates in their citizenship education. These processes are not only aimed at adolescents, but are built from and with them. 

The consultations operate outside the official and regulated spaces of socialisation and learning, therefore, we energise and call for participation via social networks, which is where minors spend a good part of their time consuming content and/or linking with their peers.

Since 2020 we have deployed 3 consultations of adolescents (13 to 17 years old): one in Arica (Chile, 2020) in conjunction with the councillor of the City Council, Dolores Cutivo (PC); another of Catalan scope (Spain, 2022); and a third in Barcelona-city (Catalonia, 2023), in which the following mayors participated: Xavier Trías (Junts), Jaume Collboni (PSC), Ernest Maragall (ERC), Gonzalo de Oro-Pulido (VOX), Basha Changue (CUP), Daniel Sirera (PP) and Eva Parera (Valents).   

We are happy and proud of the impact we have achieved in Barcelona: we inaugurated a new bridge where teenagers and the City authorities can talk to each other. Little by little, more and more adolescents know what we do and trust us; actors from the educational world have given us their support; and the political forces of the City Council and the Barcelona City Council validate us.

During the second semester of this year, in 2024, we will deploy the 3rd Consultation of Adolescents in Barcelona; in Chile we will operate in conjunction with the Alberto Hurtado University (External link); and we have explored alliances in Panama and the Dominican Republic that should materialise in 2025.

• https://www.instagram.com/p/Cq2b-c2gDnV/?hl=es (External link)