Recent years of public policy-making in Europe have shown that, despite numerous efforts, politicians have no idea how to treat young people. Especially those who say loud and clear what they want from them.
For years, young people (i.e., those under 30) have been encouraged to “co-design public policies” or so-called “youth policies” – but nobody takes them into account afterwards. Such initiatives are, unfortunately, just a hollow shell of civic democracy and, even worse, a swat on the bull’s eye.
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According to the 2022 Eurobarometer survey (announced as Year of Youth), youth engagement is on the rise, with 58 per cent of respondents active in their communities and having participated in one or more organisations in the last 12 months, 17 per cent points higher than in 2019. The most frequently mentioned demand was to be actually heard by decision-makers and to have them act on proposals created by young people (72 per cent).
Marta Musidłowska
Marcin Król Fellow
Marta Musidłowska is a graduate of the University of Warsaw Faculty of Law and CopyrightX at Harvard Law School. She specializes in areas related to digitization, in particular concerning personal data protection and ethical artificial intelligence. For several years she has been involved in policymaking in the field of Internet governance as a member of the Steering Committee of Youth IGF Poland, co-organizing the Youth Summit at the Internet Governance Forum in Katowice, Poland. She is currently an analyst for the Digital Economy research program at the Instrat Foundation, where she works on topics related to data governance and the digitization of the medical sector, as well as the protection of human rights, with a particular focus on labor rights in the face of digitization. She is co-author of the report Unleashing the Potential of Data. Managing Data as a Shared Resource," which includes a national pilot for agricultural and health data. She is actively working to raise public awareness of the value of sharing data, especially health data, participating in consultations before the European Commission on the creation of a European Health Data Space. She also provides legal support to a Polish-American startup developing the Actaware app for more informed consumer choices.
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