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ABSTRACT
This article investigates how nationwide Finnish youth civil society organizations frame their approaches to youth participation. By analyzing data from interviews, websites, and annual reports, five frames are identified. The frames differ in how they define the purpose of participation, whom they see as the main actors, and what kind of member, volunteer, or other participant roles they provide to young people. Three frames are used as master frames that see young people as agents, learners, or targets of support; two subordinate frames expand the scopes of the organizations. Only some of the frames include any concept of integrating young people into the civil society.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Researchers differ in which of the two concepts (‘youth participation’ or ‘youth civic engagement’) they use even though the phenomena they pay attention to are closely related, strongly overlapping or in some cases the same. In the interest of consistency with the topic of this article, the concept ‘youth participation’ is primarily used here.
2 In practice, this includes member organizations of the national network Finnish Youth Cooperation – Allianssi and CSOs that have applied for governmental funding (2013–2014) as nationwide youth/youth work organizations, counting those where 2/3 or more of the members are young or that have youth as the main focus or youth work as the main purpose (see also Laitinen & Taavetti, Citation2016).