For Volonteurope, an active citizen is a person who is concerned about others’ wellbeing and thus connects with them freely in a way that leads to mutual support and caring.
With so many varying definitions of what it means to be an active decision, pin-pointing and identifying barriers and enablers of active citizenship is prevented. Volonteurope has teamed up with the European Civic Forum to create a solution to this.
To do this, an international working group of experts and practitioners across Europe was established in order to collaboratively answer these questions with an international scope. A survey was launched in 9 different languages, collecting over 350 responses, to try and determine European citizen opinion on the definition of active citizenship. This bottom up definition would also serve to set the bases for an Active Citizenship Score Card, set to identify the barriers to and enablers of active citizenship.
This will allow partners to quantitatively measure levels of active citizenship according to the perceptions of individual respondents. By answering a series of questions, respondents will arrive at a final score that will place them within an ‘active citizenship scale’ set to level and determine potential barriers. This information will allow for proposed short-term recommendations and systemic changes to governments, civil society, businesses and the EU.
Find out more about Active Citizens for the Common Good on the Volonteurope website.