Stepping Up our Engagement with Youth: Handbook for Equality Bodies

The Equinet Handbook ‘Stepping Up our Engagement with Youth’, developed by the Working Group on Communication Strategies and Practices, with the cooperation of the European Youth Forum, encourages those working on equality and non-discrimination to think about how to tackle discrimination based on the needs of young people, and to cooperate with them in order to understand what those needs are.

The foreword and introduction outline how our institutions can work with and empower young people to promote equality.

Chapter 1, ‘ State of Play’, aims to address the legislation & strategies in place at European level to protect young people from discrimination. Through a summary of some useful statistics, it recognises the diversity within youth, including different ways they may experience discrimination. Finally it highlights the fields where equality bodies generally identify discrimination against young people.

Chapter 2, ‘Cooperation for Equality’, invites the reader to mainstream the youth perspective across their work, and gives suggestions on how to build partnerships and coalitions with young people and those who work with them.

Chapter 3, ‘Communicating Equality’, offers eight steps to help build a communication plan to reach out to young people, taking into account basic premise, objectives, and target group, all supported by a useful checklist. This chapter looks into framing communication for a better impact, and gives some guidelines as to how to address hate speech on social media.

Finally, the Handbook gathers a list of youth organisations for potential partnerships, as well as a handy list of resources addressing communication and relevant reading around youth work across Europe.