EU Youth Sounding Board

The problem

Institutions say they want young people in the room. Often what they want is a photograph of young people in the room.

DG INTPA set up a Youth Sounding Board with direct access to the Commissioner. It could have been a formality. The question was whether the access would mean anything.

What I did

• Selected as 1 of 25 members from 4,000+ applicants across 150 countries. The first member from the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• Advised Commissioner Jutta Urpilainen directly on youth, development and partnership policy.
• Helped write the first brief for what became the EU Youth Empowerment Fund.
• Contributed to the design of the Africa-Europe Youth Academy.
• Lobbied the EU for a youth empowerment funding mechanism through ACP YPN, the African Caribbean Pacific Young Professionals Network, including at the European Development Days.
• Brought the Dutch Caribbean and small island perspective into a directorate-general that rarely hears it in the first person.

What changed

Two years of advisory access, not a single photo opportunity. My contribution fed into policy frameworks affecting development cooperation across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

I helped write the first brief for the EU Youth Empowerment Fund, a €10 million pilot launched in October 2023 that gives young people low-barrier funding for projects in their own communities. I also contributed to the design of the Africa-Europe Youth Academy, backed by €15 million from the EU, which opened under Commissioner Urpilainen's mandate and runs from 2025 to 2029.

The most useful thing I could do was make the abstract concrete. Small island states are not a footnote in development policy. They are the test case for whether it works.