In September 2026, over 40 young people from across Europe came together in Halle (Saale), Germany, for the ECFI Youth Fest: “It’s All About You(th) – Bridging Generations, Powering Participation and Voice for Democracy.” Over three days, community foundation practitioners explored what meaningful youth participation looks like in practice and what it takes to create organisations and communities where young people have the agency, resources and space to shape decisions and drive change.
Against the backdrop of Halle and its changing social and political landscape, conversations moved from bridging polarities and strengthening social cohesion to youth leadership, participatory grantmaking and the importance of places where young people can organise, experiment and take responsibility. Through workshops, peer exchange and visits to local initiatives, the Youth Fest offered a space not only to share practices, but to question how power is distributed and how community foundations can help strengthen young people’s voice and agency in democracy.
Places matter
This year’s ECFI Youth Fest took place in Halle (Saale), in Saxony-Anhalt, and the place was not simply a backdrop to the gathering: it became part of the learning. The event was held only two weeks after the State election, which highlighted a sharply changing political landscape, with extreme right-wing party AfD winning most of the votes. Against this backdrop, questions of belonging, trust, polarisation and social cohesion felt particularly tangible: how can local organisations create spaces in which people who experience the same city very differently can meet, participate and feel that they have a stake in its future?
Bürgerstiftung Halle: a meaningful host
Bürgerstiftung Halle was therefore a particularly meaningful host for the Youth Fest. Founded by 75 citizens in 2004, the community foundation sees itself as a bridge-builder across social milieus and generations and works to strengthen civic participation and a vibrant democratic culture in Halle. Its work with children and young people is rooted in the idea that participation is learned by doing: creating opportunities to express ideas, shape neighbourhoods and experience that one’s contribution can lead to visible change.
This is evident in initiatives such as dazwischenfunken, a participatory project for young people aged around 14–21. Rather than starting from a predefined programme, the foundation asks young people what matters to them, what they would change in Halle and what they need to make it happen, and then supports them to turn those ideas into action. Youth-led ideas have already resulted in initiatives ranging from legal graffiti wall and scooter activities to workshops and new meeting spaces. Through the HALLIANZ Youth Fund, the foundation also supports projects led by young people aged 14–27 that contribute to democracy, diversity, and social cohesion. In the current context, this sustained investment in relationships, agency and spaces for participation made Bürgerstiftung Halle more than a local host: it offered a concrete example of the kind of democratic infrastructure the gathering was there to explore.
Seeing participation in place: the site visits
On the final morning, participants moved across Halle in smaller groups to visit local initiatives. The visits made visible a recurring theme of the Youth Fest: places matter because agency needs somewhere to happen. Physical spaces can become social infrastructure when young people are trusted not only to use them, but also to shape, build and take responsibility for them.
- Offspace – developed by congrav new sports e.V. together with young volunteers since 2020, Offspace responds to a simple but important need: young people need places for meeting, culture, sport and simply being. The former industrial space has gradually become a youth meeting place and hub for urban and trend sports, including skateboarding, BMX, parkour and breakdancing. Its value lies as much in the process as in the facility itself: young people have contributed to building and developing the space and continue to shape its activities, turning participation into a lived experience of ownership and self-efficacy.
- FreiFeld (Bürgerpark Freiimfelde) – a former industrial wasteland transformed into a community-managed public park with a football pitch, skate bowl, adventure playground, gardens and spaces for neighbourhood activities. The park shows what can happen when residents, local organisations and public actors collectively reclaim and shape a place. It is also where Bürgerstiftung Halle currently runs dazwischenfunken in Halle-East, accompanying young people to identify what is missing in their neighbourhood and develop their own responses. For children and young people, FreiFeld is not simply a recreational space, but a place where they can build, experiment, meet others and leave a visible mark on their surroundings.
- Galle – a self-organised children and youth space at Galgenberg that hosts groups and activities led by young people and youth organisations. The visit offered another perspective on the importance of autonomous and low-threshold spaces: places where young people can meet outside formal institutions, organise around their interests and practise taking responsibility collectively.
Taken together, the visits showed that youth participation is not only about inviting young people into existing decision-making structures. It is also about investing in spaces, relationships and local organisations that allow them to build confidence, organise, experiment and experience themselves as actors in their communities.
Bridging polarities and fostering connections
How do we remain in dialogue when our experiences of the world, our expectations for the future, and our sense of agency are radically different? A session facilitated by the Civil Society Forum and Citizens Lab invited participants to explore this question experientially rather than only discussing it in the abstract.
Using an adaptation of the Polak Game, participants physically positioned themselves according to how they agreed or disagreed on important questions, one time as themselves, the other from the perspective of a different persona that they had been assigned. The exercise made visible dimensions of power that can otherwise remain hidden in a group: who feels able to shape what comes next, who feels decisions are made elsewhere, and how personal experience and privilege influence where each of us stands. The exercise became a practical exploration of empathy, privilege and power – and of the conditions needed for meaningful dialogue. Bridging polarities does not mean erasing disagreement or pushing everyone towards the same position; it means becoming more aware of our own standpoint, listening to perspectives that may be distant from ours and creating spaces in which difference can be held without immediately turning into disconnection.
Creating organisations able to welcome and foster talent
The work of youth agency and participation needs to start from within. But are community foundations fit for attracting young people, enabling them to thrive and support them to assume leadership? Starting from these questions, Kateryna Syvyryn, Program and Project Manager at the National Network of Local Philanthropy Development (NNLPD) in Ukraine and a member of the 2026 ECFI Young-Stir, shared insights from an investigation that led her to become a 2025 International Fellow on Community Philanthropy, exploring incentives and barriers for young people joining community foundations in different contexts.
In an interactive workshop, she opened the conversation with several organisational challenges emerging from her research:
- Dependence on founders, with decision-making concentrated in one or a few people, creating risks for trust and continuity.
- High turnover and heavy reliance on volunteers.
- Fear of leadership: young people can enter workplaces with low confidence and limited access to mentoring or development opportunities.
- A lack of clear career pathways and professional development opportunities within the community foundation field.
- Informal knowledge transfer, without clear processes for passing on knowledge, relationships, and ways of working.
- Burnout: From wartime conditions to local emergencies, continuous crisis response can drain creativity and the capacity to innovate.
Participants then worked in groups around three dimensions of young people’s development pathways: attracting people, retaining and motivating them, and transferring knowledge and leadership.
- Attracting young people: go where young people already are, move beyond institutional channels and build relationships with existing youth networks; recognise that salaries, limited organisational investment, social anxiety and a constant sense of pressure can all be barriers; offer workplace flexibility; avoid one-size-fits-all approaches; and create safe spaces where people can learn from failure when given responsibility.
- Retention and motivation: participants highlighted purpose, local impact, opportunities to develop different skills, working with like-minded people, and relational work as reasons people stay. Conversely, better-paid opportunities elsewhere, unclear career pathways, unsuitable workplace cultures, and heavy bureaucratic workloads can push people away. Recognition also matters – financially, verbally, and through collective practices that acknowledge and celebrate contributions.
- Knowledge transfer and leadership: there was broad agreement that many organisations would struggle if a key person left. For community foundations in particular, transferring social capital and relationships needs to be considered intentionally from the outset. Participants discussed creating operational infrastructure to retain accumulated knowledge and practice, using shared digital tools, regular updates and leadership training, as well as leadership circles that distribute responsibility. A recurring challenge is that current funding structures rarely resource the time needed for these processes. In smaller towns and rural areas, replacing departing staff can be particularly difficult because of brain drain and a smaller talent pool.
The session closed by asking how community foundation support organisations and ECFI could help organisations on the ground. Ideas included:
- Dedicated training opportunities.
- Shared digital tools and infrastructure that community foundations could use collectively.
- Inviting more young people onto panels and into expert roles.
- Mentoring and matching between organisations.
- Shared learning spaces for organisations experimenting with similar approaches, such as Youth Advisory Boards.
Learning and exchange lab
The afternoon of the second day focused on peer exchange and on a central question running through the Youth Fest: what does it take for community foundations not simply to consult young people, but to give them agency and put them in the driving seat of decision-making? Participatory grantmaking provided a particularly concrete lens through which to explore the opportunities – and the tensions – involved in genuinely ceding power.
- Youth Bank: Giorgia Salamina from Mirafiori Community Foundation, and a member of the ECFI Young-Stir, hosted a conversation on the real-life challenges of running a Youth Bank for the first time in a neighbourhood whose population is disproportionately older. From communication and outreach to engagement on the ground and the challenge of genuinely ceding power, the group worked through practical situations and generated ideas for responding to them.
- Gen Ost Jugendfonds: part of the Zukunftswege Ost initiative, the fund supports young people aged 14–27 in Eastern Germany to develop and lead projects that strengthen their communities, democratic participation and social cohesion. Beyond providing accessible grants of up to €5,000, it puts decision-making power directly into young people’s hands: funding decisions are made quarterly by a diverse Youth Jury of young people from across Eastern Germany. Young people therefore participate not only as grant recipients but as funders and decisionmakers, determining which ideas and priorities receive resources. The initiative complements funding with mentoring, training, networking, and support to help young people independently develop and implement their projects.
The exchange around Gen Ost focused on how to design criteria for an open, non-thematic fund without creating unnecessary barriers to youth participation – and how criteria can enable rather than constrain young people’s ideas.
- Sachsen-Anhalt-Fund – the fund grew out of the commitment of three young people, Karolin Jäschke, Max Schubert and Bennet Rietdorf, who met through a programme of Kinnings Foundation that entrusted local changemakers with philanthropic resources (the Flow Fund for East Germany). Rather than allocating their resources separately, they pooled them and went on to mobilise additional support to create a fund focused on strengthening democratic and civic infrastructure across Saxony-Anhalt. The model illustrates a further shift in power: young people are not only consulted or invited to sit on a jury, but become fund designers, resource mobilisers and grantmakers, using their local knowledge and networks to identify where resources can make a difference.
Emma De Smet, Project and Knowledge Manager at Streekfonds West-Vlaanderen and an ECFI Young-Stir, invited participants to imagine their own “dream participatory fund” before moderating a conversation with Max and Bennet. The discussion explored the practical challenges they had faced and the wider question of what prevents people and organisations from ceding decision-making power – from concerns about risk and accountability to organisational habits and assumptions about expertise.
- Fund development with youth in mind – an informal conversation opened space to consider how fundraising and resource mobilisation can themselves be approached through a youth lens, and how community foundations can build the resources needed to sustain youth agency beyond individual projects or short funding cycles.
Where to go next? Possible avenues for collaboration
In addition to the site visits, the final day focused on where the group could go next together: what participants wanted to continue learning about, what they could contribute to others and where there might be opportunities for collaboration across the ECFI network.
Among the ideas that emerged were:
- Learning from one another and from other fields on topics and processes such as communication strategies, fostering belonging, bridging divides across groups and generations, and addressing skills gaps affecting young people.
- In-person exchanges that allow community foundations to learn from one another’s local contexts and practices.
- A learning journey on leadership and knowledge transfer.
- A marketplace of ideas for projects and youth-led initiatives.
- Exchange and collaboration on fund development, moving from the sustainability of individual organisations towards collaborative approaches that can support youth agency across the field.
- Continued exchange on participatory grantmaking and evaluation processes that centre young people and place them in decision-making roles.
Across these ideas, one message remained consistent: meaningful youth participation is not a single method or programme. It requires organisations willing to change how they work, funders willing to share power, spaces in which young people can organise and experiment, and relationships that make participation possible over time. The Youth Fest offered a space to examine those conditions together, and to connect people who want to continue building them across Europe.
