Enhancing youth Voices: Exploring community participation through youth workers

•Youth participation is encouraged through dialogue between young people and public institutions.•Youth workers perceive themselves as capable of innovating public policies for citizen participation.•To encourage community participation, collaboration between youth workers, young people, and adults should be encouraged. The European Union and Council of Europe (hereafter referred to as the EU and CE) encourage member states to promote and stimulate the active participation of young people through the role of youth workers. However, it is worth noting that the personal perceptions of youth workers may influence the actions they take to achieve this goal. This article aims to investigate the perceptions of youth workers and the characteristics and conditions of their interventions in promoting young people's participation in the community. To this end, six discussion groups were formed, consisting of 51 professionals working in this field in Catalonia, Spain. The findings suggest that youth workers associate the notion of participation with how young people dialogue with the public institutions. Although youth workers have observed self-managed forms of participation among young people, their aim is to improve the relationship between young people and institutions. They also acknowledge that young people are often on the margins of the local political context. Rather than being viewed as active citizens and central figures, young people are frequently seen as being in a learning and development phase towards adulthood. At the methodological level, youth workers use strategies based on socio-educational relationships and identify conditioning factors that limit the development of transformative policies for civic participation in their workplaces. It is recommended that the model for local youth policies be transformed into a more collaborative approach. This would involve collaboration between youth workers, young people and adults to foster innovative public participation policies that help promote the potential of municipalities for change.