The challenge
In Europe, trust in public institutions is falling, and civic and community engagement among young people is in decline. Bernardo Branco Gonçalves, the founder of MyPolis, argues that young people want a voice in decisions about their neighbourhoods and cities, but don’t have the space or skills to speak up, or feel like they won’t be listened to. Conventional civics lessons compound this problem. They explain how institutions work but rarely let students practise engaging with the decisions that shape where they live, leaving citizen participation as an abstraction.
The initiative
MyPolis starts from a simple inversion. Instead of teaching how citizen participation works, it has children practise shaping their communities from the age of six. Teachers receive a box of educational materials and a physical board game, deliberately chosen to work in classrooms without reliable hardware or internet access, that guides students step by step through identifying a community problem, shaping a proposal, and presenting it to decision-makers. A digital version of the game includes an AI assistant that gives students feedback on their proposals, helping make them more feasible and impactful without writing them on their behalf.
The programme is co-created with teachers and aligned to the national curriculum, so it helps them meet existing goals. Students take their ideas to a ‘social transformation assembly’ attended by politicians and public servants, where proposals are debated and voted on. Crucially, politicians must respond using cards: possible, not possible or needs modification. Even a ‘no’, explained honestly due to legal or resource constraints, is treated as valuable, as students still articulated what mattered to them and received feedback to refine the idea.
As Gonçalves puts it, “a lack of response is the most dangerous thing that can happen to any participatory process”. It hands children real influence over the places they live in, while they are still in primary school. In communities where young people’s main experience of the state has been policing, meeting representatives who take their ideas seriously changes how they see public institutions as a whole.
Early results and transformative potential
The numbers are striking. More than 70,000 children across over 100 schools have played MyPolis games, submitting more than 5,000 proposals. Over 800 have reached assemblies, and more than 300 have been implemented, an unusually high conversion rate for participatory processes. One student-led solidarity fair in Lagoa has grown into an annual festival drawing more than 18,000 people: a small piece of inclusive urban planning shaped by children.
Independent evaluation against control groups shows gains of up to 50% in autonomy and knowledge of public institutions, alongside rising trust. Some municipalities now run student assemblies on their own, and the model has already travelled to Spain, Hungary, Italy, Belgium and Poland.
MyPolis shows that when young people are trusted with real decisions, civic engagement and inclusive planning follow.
How can schools and governments work together, through action and response, to foster citizen participation in future generations?
