Introduction
Having documented the origins and current state of the “Resilience Council” concept in the recently published Resilience Council handbook, it is timely to examine the development of the “Youth Resilience Council” concept.
Project Saufex
Both concepts trace back to the Horizon-funded EU project Saufex that explores more effective ways to deal with potentially harmful information challenges. While the Resilience Council was explicitly conceptualized from the outset, the extension of this framework to systematically include the general public emerged more tentatively and exploratory. The project design anticipated an active role for citizens; however, the institutional format and procedural architecture of such participation were not predefined. Two potential roads were nevertheless identified. First, the establishment of stochocratic Citizen Panels tasked with drafting policy recommendations, inspired by Ursula von der Leyen’s 2022 initiative on participatory democracy. Second, the use of crowdsourcing mechanisms to strengthen the co-creation of research and innovation agendas and substantive content.
Embedding for the concept
During the implementation of the project, two approaches were slowly integrated to create a theoretical and practical embedding for general-public Resilience Councils: on the one hand Stephen Lewandowsky’s distinction between “fact-speaking”, a discourse type aiming for congruency with what is known about the external world, and “belief-speaking”, a discourse type taking individual inner states as the basis of reasoning, and on the other hand James Surowiecki’s wisdom of crowds principles. Surowiecki’s key insight is that when individual perspectives are aggregated correctly, crowds consistently outperform even knowledgeable individuals across three types of problems: cognition, coordination, and cooperation.
The challenge
Unfortunately, one requirement for the “correct” aggregation of individual perspectives, as described by Surowiecki, is logistically challenging: independence in thinking. According to Surowiecki, individuals must make their decisions without interference by others; no communication among them is allowed. Individual responses should be presented at the same time to prevent them from influencing each other. Concretely, this means that members of a group should get the same question at the same time, be prohibited to communicate, and provide their answers independently. While this is a relatively simple procedure in small groups, it becomes a problem when considering the whole of the general public.
The answer
The logistical difficulty of ensuring independence in thinking at scale led to a focus on adolescents as an initial target group for piloting a general-public Resilience Council. The education system provides an institutional frame within which the procedural requirements outlined by Surowiecki can be implemented. Students can be presented with the same central question at the same time in multiple classes, communication can be restricted during the response phase, and answers can be collected simultaneously. What was still missing, however, was an appropriate didactic format that would allow individual perspectives to be shared without compromising through mutual interference. Fortunately, a staff member of a Saufex partner had developed with his wife the didactics needed: Interdemocracy.
Interdemocracy
Interdemocracy is both a didactic method and format. The basic format, a European Commission good practice, is deceivingly simple: students are asked how they feel, are asked to answer a question, and are asked what sense the session had for them. What makes the format pivotal are the principles that constitute the method. The most important principles include: all activities are performed by all students equally, no exceptions; no student is allowed to react to the perspectives provided by other students; all students speak exclusively in the I-form; student answers are first written down by hand, then digitalized, and then spoken out aloud; the following order in which perspectives are shared is established randomly; teachers act as facilitators, which means maintaining a friendly, neutral tone, treating all students equal, and not offer opinions, encouragement, or help. Interdemocracy has been positively peer-reviewed both on a theoretical level (the peer review comments are integral part of the Interdemocracy book, pdf) and on a practical level by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Pomeranian Center for Teacher Education (the observation summaries can be found in this pdf).
Program Interdemocracy
The mix of Lewandowsky, Surowiecki, and Interdemocracy led to program Interdemocracy, a set-up in which students in classes formulate their perspectives and a Youth Resilience Council gathers these perspectives and formulates recommendations based on these perspectives. In practice the flow functions as follows: the Youth Resilience Council formulates a central question, the central question is distributed to schools, individual teachers in the role of facilitators enable students to provide their answers to the central question, the answers are gathered on a central server, a generative AI is tasked to find clusters and two-step binary forks in the answers, the Youth Resilience Council receives the report and formulates recommendations, the recommendations are sent back to the schools, the facilitators enable students to provide their reflections on the recommendations, the recommendations, through the central server and AI reporting, reach the Youth Resilience Council that then formulates its definitive recommendations.
Thought leadership
The concept of Youth Resilience Councils within program Interdemocracy was theoretically and practically developed incrementally in Saufex blog posts and included in the annex of the Resilience Council handbook. In January 2025, the concept was presented through the mediation of the Saufex coordinator, to representatives of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, and then, in June 2025, to the defender community at a Polish Presidency conference in Helsinki, Finland (pdf). The concept is currently being piloted within the framework of the Saufex project by the Pomeranian Center for Teacher Education and the Citizen Project Foundation. Students in sixteen classes in ten primary schools in the Pomeranian region (Poland) share their perspectives on three topics: what they see as priority fields for student participation, what aspects of artificial intelligence teachers should be aware of when employing AI in educational settings, and what conditions students envision for teachers to facilitate lessons on difficult topics. Students of a Gdańsk high school regularly convene to formulate and reformulate recommendations based on the perspectives of the primary school students. The definitive recommendations will be presented at a conference in March 2026 in Gdańsk, Poland. At the conference also observations by PCEN rapporteurs will be made public. Reflections on the ongoing pilot are regularly being published as Saufex blog posts.
The future
The concept of general-public Resilience Councils, and Youth Resilience Councils in particular, remains at an early stage of development. Considerable groundwork lies ahead to move from an abstract policy recommendation, such as that outlined in the Policy Brief produced by five EU-funded projects, to a fully operational and institutionalized practice.