The #EUHPP Live Webinar From Token to Table: Making Youth Engagement Count took place on March 12th and shone a spotlight on a few best practice examples on intergenerational collaboration in health and ensuring meaningful youth engagement.
In the beginning, the reasoning for establishing the Thematic Network "Youth Chapter on NCD Prevention" was discussed. The Youth Chapter is envisioned as a way on how to create a sustainable space where youth perspectives could be systematically integrated into the work of the NCD community in European context. Rather than engaging young people only occasionally, the idea was to establish a dedicated mechanism that enables intergenerational exchange where young people can contribute ideas, challenge existing approaches, and help co-create solutions, while older, more experienced experts, can champion the youth, learn how to work with them in a meaningful way, and offer institutional support.
The goal of this Youth Chapter is simple but powerful: to move youth engagement from tokenism to partnership. That means ensuring that young people are not just present in conversations, but that their insights genuinely shape the direction of policies, advocacy, and implementation.
The webinar provided a space for learning, inspiration, and exchange — bringing together policymakers, public health professionals, civil society organisations, and youth representatives who are committed to strengthening youth engagement in NCD prevention.
The invited speakers shared their experiences on what meaningful youth engagement looks like in practice, what challenges remain, and how we can work together to ensure that youth voices are truly heard in health policy processes.
- Arnfinn Helleve discussed his experience of involving youth in the CO-CREATE project that was coordinated by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and what the Institute and its experts learned from youth and the entire experience.
- Sofia Bergqvist touched upon the process of establishing a Youth Advisory Group within Joint Action PreventNCD and what was it like being active in the YAG throughout 2025.
- Mehitabel Holler talked about the efforts of the European Heart Network in creating their own Young Hearts space for meaningful youth engagement and what lessons were learned.
Presentations were followed by a short Q&A and an interactive discussion on the process of drafting the Joint Statement for this Thematic Network. We were joined by a representative of DG SANTE who outlined the process, before all participants were welcome to contribute to the collective conversation and share their reflections and opinions about the key topics the Joint Statement should contain.
We are grateful to all of the speakers and participants for the fruitful exchange, and are looking forward to our upcoming events (save the date for our next webinars on the 6th of May and the 16th of June)!
For those who could not attend, the webinar recording is now available in our resource section. We also invite readers to explore the related resources linked below the article.
