At the Estonian National Agency, young people new to EU programmes explained what holds them back, and their input really did change training formats and materials. Yet, as the team openly admits, there was “no proper feedback loop for the group”: “no follow-up meeting, no summary email linking ‘you said; we did’.” They see this as a missed opportunity. The change happened, but the young people who made it possible may never have known.
Many National Agencies will recognise the pattern. People give their time and ideas.. Some suggestions can be acted on quickly, such as a new training format or clearer information materials. Others, however, depend on the next work plan, on budgets that are not yet known or on decisions taken at European level. Months pass. By the time something changes, the group’s mandate may have ended, the event’s participant list may have been closed, and the colleague who ran the consultation may have moved on. This is rarely a story of neglect. Most teams do act on what they hear; the difficulty is that the answer does not always travel back.
Why does this happen, even in organisations that take participation seriously? Across the stories in this issue and recent reports, a few situations come up again and again.
First, decisions sit at different levels. A National Agency can change its own training, information and events, but not the programme rules or European priorities, so some answers are simply not available yet, and replying “not yet” can feel awkward.
Second, timescales do not match. Advisory groups and youth boards may have mandates of a year or two. National Agencies plan year by year and programmes run for seven years, so the people who gave their input have often moved on before a decision is made.
Third, contact is lost. When an event or project ends, participant lists are closed, and there may be no agreed way to write to people months later.
Fourth, follow-up rarely has an owner or a budget. Consultations and evaluations are planned, but telling people what came of them often is not, so it may slip behind the next deadline.
Timing matters at the start too, as young people quoted in the NPiY report warn that “another common mistake is to include young people in the process too late.”
The OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes (2022) put the stakes plainly: without a planned follow-up, people may be discouraged “from participating another time.”
In our last issue, we suggested a simple habit for National Agencies, a regular “We heard / We did” message. Closing the loop builds on that habit and has two parts. The first part is the answer that goes back to participants: what happened to their input, what changed, what could not change yet, and why. The second part is the learning that goes forward to the next initiative, so that the next project, mandate or event is designed with it.
When neither happens, work starts to move in circles: each new initiative begins closer to zero than it needs to, and participants are left wondering whether anything happened at all. When both happen successfully, each round builds on the last. It is more a spiral than a circle: from above it looks the same but it rises with every turn.
One way to make sure both parts happen is to design endings as carefully as we design beginnings. We put a great deal of thought into calls, invitations and agendas. It is just as valuable to ask, at the outset, what will end, what will continue, and what we will carry forward and to whom.
The New Power in Youth partnership offers an example of doing exactly that. In its report on four years of work (2021–2024), activities are labelled with their future: “to be continued”, “to be continued annually as an NA network training”, or “discontinued”, and where an activity was discontinued, the reason is given. Activities don’t simply disappear, and partners and participants can see what ended, what lives on, and why.
Endings also have a human side. The Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model, developed by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, reminds us that change needs people who help the old end well, honouring what it achieved and harvesting its lessons, and people who nourish what is emerging. In our world, this might mean properly thanking an advisory group at the end of its mandate, documenting what it achieved and briefing the next group. It might mean harvesting what a pilot taught and connecting it to colleagues who are about to begin something similar.
In practice, closing the loop is less about adding new activities than about taking care of the ones we already have.
The Latvian National Agency shows what the emerging side can look like. Young people co-organised national events from the very start, and the Agency’s role became to “let the youngsters fully plan the activities, while the Agency can ‘polish’ them.” As one young organiser put it afterwards, “the people of the National Agency are not bosses; turns out, we are a team!”
The questions below can help prepare the follow-up before the next consultation, event or advisory group begins.
5 questions for every new beginning
- What did we learn last time, and who did we tell?
- What will end, what will continue, and how will we say so?
- Who will carry participants’ input to where decisions are made?
- When will participants hear back, and in what form?
- Who will we pass the learning to when this ends?