YEE is one of the participating partners in the project STEP - Societal and political engagement of young people in environmental issues, which is co-financed by the programme Horizon 2020 from the European Commission. The project will be developed from 1 June 2015 to 30 November 2017 and its main aim is to attract young European citizens to participate in decision-making procedures on environmental issues.

According to Eurobarometer, half of the young people tend to distrust the European Union. Traditional channels of representative democracy, such as voting at elections and joining political parties, stimulate only partially young people's interest in active participation.

However, especially for environmental issues, the participation of young people in decision making is an essential part of developing a sustainable future.

The STEP project addresses the need of public organisations to effectively open their decision-making procedures that have an environmental impact to young people. The overall objective of the project is to develop and pilot test an eParticipation cloud platform, enhanced with web / social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features, which will promote the societal and political participation of young people in the decision-making processes on environmental issues.

Four pilots in an operational environment have been selected for the deployment of STEP solution in 4 locations: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, with the participation of one regional authority, 3 municipalities, and an association of municipalities. The pilots are expected to involve testing by 8.200 young users and 85 policy makers.

Throughout STEP, YEE will be mainly working on the dissemination stage, involving young people in the testing of the platform. Stay connected to YEE's updates on the project!