Objectives

VOICE specifically aims to:

1. Develop and implement a strategy from the ground up, supported from the top by all the partner organisations, to promote the representation of the voice of young people that are deprived of their liberty in the EU youth policies.
2. Place the voices of young adults deprived of their liberty together with other young people's voices in the centre of the policies and strategies that concern them, namely EU policies.
3. Empower young people that are deprived of their liberty by creating awareness of their role at a community level, enabling them to participate in community affairs and discover that they are capable of ‘making a difference’.
4. Create trust and safe environments for young adults that are both at risk of committing crimes/deprived of their liberty, and by doing so, enhancing their sense of belonging and solidarity.
5. Create immediate responses to mitigate the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on violent extremist recruitment and radicalisation, namely on young people in contact with the Criminal Justice System.
6. Engage key stakeholders in the field (prison authorities, universities, civil society organisations, schools, policy makers…) in a process of developing a way forward to respond to the gap of the lack of visibility of young people deprived of their liberty at the centre of the policies that concern them.

These objectives are in line with the European Youth Together action (in particular, EU Youth Goals #3 and #4) as the partnership seeks to boost a sense of European citizenship for this under-represented group of young people by organising training and roundtables with stakeholders.