LEAP is an acronym that stands for “Learning to Participate”. It is a project financed within the framework of the European Union Erasmus+ programme. It is a strategic partnership between three youth organizations and two universities. What gathered the partnership together is our interest in youth participation and our objective to foster young people’s participation.

The partnership is between the department of Didactic of civic and citizenship education at the University of Vienna (Austria), coordinators of the project, Institut für Didaktik der Demokratie at the Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), Centro per lo Sviluppo Creativo Danilo Dolci (Italy), Udruga Mladi u EU (Croatia) and Sapere Aude (Austria).

Actual or alleged lack of youth interest and participation in political, social and civic matters is an issue of great concern in policy and research. In order to address this issue, we work on a systemic approach that tries to encourage youth workers’ training, empower young people, and contribute to organisational changes and policy debates.

The objectives of the project are to:

• Introduce the youth-centered pedagogical approach of Project-based learning (PBL) in non-formal education youth organisations.
• Reinforce young people’s empowerment intended as a capacity for action.

PBL is a model that organises learning around projects. It is considered a method enhancing motivation, developing independent thinking, transferring knowledge into practice, encouraging democratic values and democratic manners of behavior, creating self-confidence and training social responsibility.