Deep dives
The School of Creativity and Democracy as a laboratory for democratic experimentation and civic impact
The School of Creativity and Democracy was born as a laboratory of democratic experimentation in response to an alarming fact: 87% of young people do not feel heard by politicians, even though 92% are concerned about social issues.
In a climate of disaffection, polarization, and disinformation, the School seeks to turn this contradiction into civic energy, recognizing that youth are already engaging in politics, albeit not in orthodox ways: petitions, conscious consumption, graffiti, activism on social media, flash mobs, protests. To this end, it offers them a space where creativity can be channeled into real impact on public administrations.
Following a training itinerary designed to prepare new professionals in deliberation, the School combines intersectional care with methodologies from the performing and visual arts: practices, rehearsals, and prototyping with legislative theater, audiovisual translation of processes, the design of platforms capable of mobilizing thousands of people, and disruptive methodologies such as participatory ethnofanzines.
But the most remarkable aspect of the School is its commitment to making an impact while learning, activating agreements with institutions that allow students to experience real participation processes in which they themselves become protagonists. Thus, during the first edition, a Didactic Unit on Democracy and Creativity was implemented in schools in Madrid and Barcelona, facilitated by the students themselves; the Mindset Revolution project was scaled up regionally alongside the University of Birmingham and Kasal de Joves de Roquetes; at the national level, collaborations were established with the Spanish Civic Assembly, a group of citizens emerging from the first Spanish State Climate Assembly to publicize its 172 recommendations; and the right to deep time was explored as a necessary condition for healthy political participation. The issue of migrants’ right to the city was also addressed from the perspective of young people and single-parent families under the framework of a Migrant Constitution, in line with voices such as Desirée Bela-Lobedde’s, who call for moving from anti-racist diagnosis to effective political processing.
Through the development of its own podcast and a digital platform for simulations and real initiatives, the cohort has been able to debate and interview various professionals and activists on issues such as eco-anxiety, the right to joy, or political disaffection among young people, while also exploring the foundations of participatory urbanism.
In summary, it is a body of knowledge and experiences that shape a community in motion: facilitators capable of depolarizing and creating safe spaces, process developers who harmonize thousands of opinions into viable recommendations, creative researchers who bridge academia and data journalism, and advocacy leaders who turn conclusions into campaigns with real impact.
After the first edition, five policy briefs have been compiled, produced over the three months of training, representing the perfect synthesis between capacity building and advocacy that the School aims for.
Uses of Time and Their Relation to Political Participation: A Redistribution Proposal
If time is unequally distributed, so is democracy. With that premise, we designed a participatory democracy experiment to examine to what extent “time poverty” especially affects those who provide care and those who work endless hours outside the spaces where common decisions are made.
The first phase involved formulating the hypothesis and observing. We launched an exploratory survey on OpenSpaces (Decidim) between March and June 2024: 352 responses, 323 valid. We asked about time use (paid work, unpaid care, commuting), participation practices, and barriers/facilitators (work-life balance, asynchronous formats, digital modalities), and complemented this with 12 interviews with participation and gender specialists to interpret patterns and blind spots. Finally, we triangulated with HETUS, the major European time-use survey, to situate the local data in a broader framework.
Time is running out.
Esepe (2023)
In the second phase, we approached the research as an experiment, recording the “variables” conditioning participation. What emerged was a clear and persistent picture: many people devote between three and six hours a day to unpaid care, and this burden disproportionately falls on women. When combining care and employment, women accumulate between seven and seven and a half hours daily, compared to six to six and a half for men. Rest is also eroded: many report sleeping only five to seven hours, far below the recommended amount, especially during parenting stages. And when we look at participation, it appears as residual: barely seven to ten minutes a day are dedicated to associations, volunteering, or politics.
The provisional result is that time becomes a democratic bottleneck, and not in the same way for everyone, but intersected by gender, life stage, social class, and migratory status. In other words, without available time, participation ends up competing with saturated agendas and dissolving in the urgency of survival.
The central learning from the experiment was undoubtedly that without temporal justice, there is no democratic quality. Citizens want to participate and show it by appropriating digital and proximity formats, but on a fragile foundation marked by less free time than the European average and an unequal burden of care. When we redesign processes to fit the real agenda of life, participation stops being a luxury and becomes a practicable right.
Listening to Young People for Better Intersectional Mental Health Support
For three years, young people from Manchester and Barcelona have been working with Platoniq on participatory research and creative democracy processes related to mental health. Through Legislative Theatre, digital participation and face-to-face assemblies, they have managed to represent their experiences in order to highlight the intersectional oppressions they face and transform them into policy proposals.
These dynamics, combined with online collective mapping processes, enabled young people to co-create recommendations for health institutions, schools and local governments. Beyond the content of the proposals, the key was the active role of young people, who were not the subject of study, but protagonists in defining the policies that affect them.
But that’s not all. The Platoniq Foundation accompanied the young people in evaluating their own participation and perceived social impact, strengthening both their confidence and their democratic capacities. This change in focus shifts the gaze from individual deficits to processes and structures, inviting the design of intersectionally inclusive policies.
Presentation of conclusions to the Catalan Youth Agency
Platoniq (2025)
To round off all this collective work, between 23rd and 26th June 2025, the group of young people from Barcelona travelled to Manchester to continue exploring the recommendations that had emerged from the process, but not before discussing various topics related to mental health in a collaborative podcast.
As a result of these dialogues, four major issues were identified from an intersectional perspective: ecological anxiety, gender equality in schools, ending tokenism, and housing insecurity. These issues were addressed through Legislative Theatre workshops, which ultimately produced** three politically verified recommendations** in collaboration with various authorities in Greater Manchester: Department of Participation, Community Health, Youth and Mobility, as well as teachers and researchers from social organisations.
- Proposal 1: Every school and workplace has an Equality and Rights Department.
- Proposal 2: Creation of a Responsibility and Legacy Council
- Proposal 3: Promoting safe spaces to try out new ways of working
The recommendations drawn up in Manchester and Barcelona show that when young people are placed at the forefront, not only do concrete proposals emerge to improve services and access, but also new ways of understanding democracy and care in a collective sense, and that youth mental health cannot be addressed without recognising the plurality of identities and oppressions that permeate their lives.
As a result of all this work, we present the recommendations on intersectional mental health developed by young people aged 16 to 25 through three participatory processes: Mindset Revolution in Manchester, and Foro Joven and CoActuem per la Salut Mental in Barcelona.
Claiming Recognition: The Right to the City from Migrant Youth
The Right to the City Workshop marked the culmination of the training itinerary of the first edition of the School of Creativity and Democracy. On July 10, 2025, fifteen young people aged 18 to 30 from Barcelona—migrants accompanied by Fundació Barcelonactua, activists defending migrants’ rights, and a representative of the Generalitat—participated in a Legislative Theater exercise facilitated by the School’s own cohort. It was a safe, participatory space where, through dramatization, collective research, and digital tools, the right to the city was rethought from the diversity of class, ethnicity, and gender.
From personal and collective experiences, theatrical scripts emerged, creatively embodied through clothing changes, improvised props, and everyday gestures that made tangible the harshness of administrative procedures and exclusion situations. This scriptwriting and performance process allowed experiences of oppression to be transformed into empathetic, shared narratives.
After the performance came the political laboratory. Participants reflected on what transformations were needed to turn these scenes of oppression into opportunities. Two public policy proposals emerged: the first, focused on fair transitions to citizenship for vulnerable migrant youth, addresses the fragmented educational and housing circuits faced by those without papers, family networks, or stable housing. The second, centered on the digital administrative pathway with human support, denounces excessive bureaucratic complexity, duplication of procedures, and lack of coordination between public offices, which ultimately hinder access to basic rights.
Voting on policy proposals
Platoniq (2025)
This exercise not only generated concrete recommendations but also embodied the School’s spirit: giving voice and protagonism to those directly affected, so that they themselves lay the foundations for democratic debate.
Migrant Mothers: Triple Vulnerability and the Right to a Dignified Life
In Barcelona, a group of migrant mothers gathered in 2025 to turn their experiences into political action. With the support of Platoniq and through Legislative Theater, they staged everyday moments they carried with them: the closed door of a rental agency upon seeing a hijab, the humiliation during a job interview for being a single mother, the coldness of a health center questioning their right to be treated. Each scene was a mirror of exclusion, but also a starting point.
The audience, turned into spect-actors, stood up to change the story: demanding anti-discrimination housing laws, sanctions against labor abuses, or inclusive healthcare protocols. Thus, indignation turned into concrete proposals.
Participants after the Legislative Theatre workshop
Platoniq (2025)
From this process, three clear pathways emerged: dignified housing, with real access for rooted families even without papers; fair employment, with regularization and protection against exploitation; and non-discriminatory social and health services, with community mediators and cultural competence training.
Beyond the measures, the workshop revealed that migrant mothers are not passive recipients of aid—they are builders of the city and citizenship. Recognizing their rights is not an act of compassion but an essential condition to guarantee the right to the city and build fairer, more cohesive communities.
Youth Participation as Key Infrastructure in the Face of Eco-Social Distress
In a working session on Friday, July 11, 2025, a safe, participatory space was opened for young voices to express themselves, propose, and reimagine democracy from their lived experiences, with a roundtable podcast on eco-anxiety, mental health, and youth disaffection (hosted by Alejandra Gallardo together with Sara S. Ribés and Carla Riera) as the starting point. The objective: to translate everyday experiences into raw material for public decision-making in the face of eco-social distress.
The day began with the podcast recording, connecting the climate crisis, mental health, and participation, underlining the need for real channels of influence so that youth engagement does not turn into impotence or withdrawal. From there, a fanzine workshop transformed stories and emotions into “trigger pieces,” documenting ideas and desires through collage and writing; this material became a shared framework for empathetic, situated diagnosis.
Outcome of the fanzine workshop
Platoniq (2025)
Following this expressive phase came the political laboratory: Platoniq systematized and organized contributions into strategic lines of action. The brief develops three main areas: first, incorporating youth eco-anxiety as a focus of mental health and climate action policies, with institutional recognition, care protocols, and youth climate forums; second, making deliberation a true educational infrastructure in Secondary, Baccalaureate, and Vocational Training, with funding for assemblies and mechanisms to integrate their proposals into decision-making; and third, integrating emotions and creativity into deliberative practices through legislative theater, fanzines, or artistic languages, to broaden inclusion, reinforce legitimacy, and nurture collective hope.
Beyond the measures, the exercise demonstrates the School’s spirit: giving protagonism to those who live the problem and supporting their translation into policies with social legitimacy. Platoniq acts as process architect: convening, facilitating, and ensuring collective validation of proposals, steering the work toward democratic resilience with a structural, community, and intersectional approach—a clear invitation to institutions to move from diagnosis to action alongside youth.
This project was made possible thanks to the support of Open Society Foundations.
