Mediterranean Youth in Action Programme, MYA
About the Mediterranean Youth in Action Programme
The Mediterranean Youth in Action (MYA) programme places young people at the heart of change in the Euro-Mediterranean region. It is designed to encourage political participation among youth, bridge generational gaps, and promote active citizenship. The programme aims to engage young individuals through various activities and empower them as agents of positive change and responsible leaders by equipping them with skills, support, and network, not only to make their voices heard, but also to transform their perspectives and ideas into action.
MYA adopts an intersectional approach, fostering complementarity between local and regional processes, and is guided by policies relevant to youth inclusion in the Euro-Mediterranean region. The programme has three main goals: empowering young people to shape public policy and engage with decision-makers and civil society; implementing transformative initiatives through participatory approaches; and enhancing youth leadership in decision-making and coordination with peers across the Euro-Mediterranean space.
To achieve these objectives, the programme focuses on three main areas of youth engagement through three different strands:
Voicing Youth Knowledge
This strand reflects the programme’s commitment to invest in young researchers to develop evidence-based research that addresses the Mediterranean’s most pressing challenges with innovative solutions, enhances their critical thinking, debate, and problem-solving skills, and ensure proper dissemination and exploitation of results and overall outreach with civil society organisations and broader audiences. It also provides policymakers with cutting-edge perspectives and approaches.
By capitalising on building their capacities, we’re creating a new generation of researchers who can provide practical insights to decision-makers that will help in driving positive change to our community.
The Voicing Youth Knowledge runs in 12-month cycles with different stages. Each cycle begins with 50 pre-selected young researchers joining online training on policy brief writing, communication, and dissemination, after which 25 are selected to attend a face-to-face Knowledge Workout Workshop, a peer-to-peer exchange and review process, enriched by direct feedback from stakeholders and experts.
From there, young researchers move forward to elaborate full policy briefs, blog posts, and communication products. The briefs are published through the ALF website, the Intercultural Dialogue Research Centre, the Voicing Youth Knowledge Blog, and ALF’s digital channels. Outreach is reinforced through Civil Society Dialogues at national level with the support of ALF national networks among others in addition to Academic Dialogues organised by the young researchers in their institutes to share research results. Each cycle closes with a face-to-face evaluation and results-sharing meeting to feed into the next round.
The Voicing Youth Knowledge Blog was created by ALF to provide a platform that gathers contributions from participating young researchers to disseminate their findings and outputs with wider audiences. To see the outputs from cycle one, read more here.
Transformative Youth
This strand underlines that youth-led initiatives are key to unlocking the Mediterranean’s potential. It aims to empower transformative young leaders to implement grassroots initiatives on both shores of the Mediterranean, with a primary focus on community needs and inclusion models. This is achieved through community micro-grants that support youth-driven transformative initiatives. In this way, the strand advances a participatory approach rooted in youth ownership, positioning transformative young leaders as effective agents of sustainable change and empowerment at the grassroots level.
The Transformative Youth track runs in 12-month cycles, starting with 50 pre-selected young leaders who take part in online training on project cycle management, communication, and dissemination. From these, 25 are selected to join a face-to-face Kick-Off Engaging Meeting, where they refine their proposals, exchange methodologies, and identify areas of common interest through collective peer review and discussion exercise to promote a sense of ownership and networking.
The selected 25 young leaders then move to the implementation phase to carry out their community-based initiatives, with continuous mentoring, online follow-ups, and tailored support from the ALF Secretariat. Each cycle closes with a results-sharing and evaluation meeting during the MYA Forum, giving participants the chance to assess their impact, exchange practices, and explore ways to strengthen or scale up their initiatives.
As part of the strand, young transformative leaders play an active role in producing diverse written and audiovisual content tailored to their initiatives, ensuring their contributions and outcomes are effectively shared and widely disseminated through ALF’s digital channels.
Transformative Narratives
ALF considers young people not only as beneficiaries but also as partners in building more inclusive and sustainable societies. Through the Young Mediterranean Youth in Action programme, structured platforms are provided to strengthen intercultural dialogue and enhance youth participation in policymaking, supported by a dedicated component that works in tandem with its three strands.
This strand recognises the power of young influencers in shaping our world and reaffirms their role as key actors in creating content that matters for the Mediterranean region. It aims to empower young influencers on both sides of the Mediterranean to implement transformative communication and dissemination actions at the national and regional levels. This is achieved through funding and supporting national and regional social media outreach campaigns and delivering training activities on communication and dissemination and evaluating as well as facilitating the implementation of outreach campaigns.
The strand builds on the crucial role of young influencers, showing their active role as change actors in shaping media narratives and enhancing youth civil society outreach and the general public’s awareness.
The Transformative Narratives track runs in 18-months cycles. Each cycle begins with 50 pre-selected young influencers receiving online training sessions on designing and implementing social media campaigns. From this stage, 25 young influencers are selected to attend a face-to-face kick-off meeting to refine their approaches, exchange methodologies, to improve them through a collective review and discussion exercise that promotes ownership and networking.
The 25 young influencers then implement their national outreach campaigns followed by an intermediate online session and the submission of regional campaign outlines in North–South tandems. From these, 5 regional campaigns are selected for implementation, receiving financial support each and continuous collaborative monitoring. Each cycle concludes with an in-person evaluation and results-sharing meeting, ensuring lessons learned are applied in subsequent cycles. Young influencers also co-create written and audiovisual outputs per cycle to share their experiences and campaign results through ALF’s digital channels.
Intercultural Stakeholders’ Dialogues
It aims to engage young leaders in participatory processes and policy decision-making dialogues throughout the Euro-Mediterranean region to improve their advocacy skills and nurture the sense of ownership in youth towards the policies and programmes of the European Union, the ALF, and relevant stakeholders. This participatory approach also contributes to a transformative change in the way young leaders perceive and practice leadership, encouraging them to engage in democratic life and bridge the gap between policy-making and civil society.
We believe that supporting even a single young researcher, leader, or influencer can generate meaningful change across the Mediterranean. By equipping young people with the tools and opportunities to lead, we not only strengthen their own role but also create a ripple effect by encouraging others to act and contribute to sustainable transformations in their communities.
Sustaining Engagement Beyond the Cycles and Strands: Youth Board and Alumni Scheme
The Mediterranean Youth in Action builds on sustaining youth engagement beyond the implementation of its cycles and strands by creating an ALF Youth Board to ensure the inclusion of young people in the programming, implementation, monitoring, and improvement of the MYA and other youth-related programmes. It also establishes an ALF Alumni Scheme, bringing together past participants to strengthen youth engagement at the regional level and enhance their capacity to cooperate with peers across the Euro-Mediterranean region.