COSY: building community safety together with young people

Stefania, project manager at Dynamo International, attended the COSY project kick-off conference.

Cosmina is 15. She lives on the outskirts of Geraardsbergen, takes a 20-minute bus ride to school, and calculates faster than any of her classmates. Yet her grades are poor — she was marked absent twice without justification: once for a family event, once because she was translating for her sick father at the doctor. When the school called her parents in, there was no interpreter. Cosmina translated herself, in a situation she didn’t fully have the words for. Pulled between two worlds, she wants to belong to both — but wonders if that’s possible without losing herself.

Cosmina is not an isolated case. She embodies a cycle that COSY aims to break: young people feel unsafe → lose trust → feel unheard → frustration grows → becomes visible → society punishes → they feel even more excluded. Most responses target visible behaviours. COSY asks a different question: what’s happening underneath?

What COSY does differently

Community Safety through Youth Participation at Local Level is a 24-month European project led by Uit De Marge (Belgium) and the City of Amsterdam, running across 8 urban and rural territories. Its principle: bring together young people (15–29), youth workers, local policymakers and institutions — as equals — across three phases:

Listen — informal circles inspired by hip-hop Cypher culture, no hierarchy, no judgment

Connect — a Story Library: a councillor sees a public square as dangerous; a young person goes there because home isn’t safe — same place, different realities

Act together — a concrete, co-built action plan: the Quadruple Helix

What we learn with Cosmina

At the kick-off conference, there was a good energy among the dozens of field professionals present — all determined to understand how to concretely change their daily reality. In my working group on education, a teacher from Rotterdam and two youth welfare representatives worked together on Cosmina’s case using the Omdenken method — literally, thinking differently, flipping the problem. Two simple but powerful shifts emerged:

Changing roles — Cosmina already translates between two worlds. What if the school gave her that role formally? The young person becomes the expert; the institution learns from her, not about her.

Starting from what works — if every meeting began with ‘your daughter is remarkable at maths’ rather than the absence list, the conversation would already be different.

Why Dynamo is involved

As a dissemination partner of COSY, Dynamo International will follow its progress and share its methods across its European networks — because this project embodies what we stand for: meeting young people where they are, building trust before building solutions, and recognising their expertise in their own lives. Methods will be freely shared at the end of the 24 months.