“Futures Champions” is a foraus’ project that aims to increase young people’s participation in the democratic debate. 

By providing young people with the necessary tools and knowledge in areas such as the Swiss political system, participatory policy-making and developing desirable visions of the future through futures literacy, we have the goal to: 

• Empower and enable young people to impact politics with their ideas
• Provide the tools for young people to design their futures
• Equip young people with project design and management skills
• Strengthen young people’s ability to listen and exchange in a group with different ideas and then present the group’s ideas to other actors, such as politicians and relevant stakeholders
• Strengthen the feeling of young people to be able to meaningfully impact and have a say in how our future is designed and realized

What is Futures Literacy?

Futures literacy is a term used by UNESCO to define a capability: A universal skill built on the ability to imagine the future to encourage imagination, preparedness, and the ability to reinvent and recover as changes occur. The future becomes a policy-making tool to transform current governance.

What?
We identified and selected futures champions among a pool of Swiss youths with the goal to represent different identities of the Swiss confederation.

• First, they will receive training by foraus on futures literacy, participatory policy-making and basic notions of the Swiss political system.
• Second, they will run workshops in your local community to identify desirable outcomes of the future and develop actionable policy recommendations based on those visions.
• Finally, the results of these workshops will be shared with representatives of the forming government in 2024.

Outcome

We identified and selected futures champions among a pool of Swiss youths with the goal to represent different identities of the Swiss confederation.

After receiving training from foraus on futures literacy, participatory policy-making, and fundamental aspects of the Swiss political system, our Champions utilised foraus’ digital crowd-innovation platform, Policy Kitchen, to conduct local participatory futures workshops in their respective cantons of origin throughout the second half of 2023 (Bern on September 5, Zurich on September 6, Lausanne on September 18, Geneva on September 20, and Basel on November 21).

Following these successful workshops and guided by our foraus community, our Champions consolidated the outcomes to create a project brief encompassing the innovative ideas generated. The project culminated with the presentation of this jointly authored publication during the foraus General Assembly held in April 2024. 

Futures Champions will be realised again in 2024 in a slightly modified form.