Making change. ‘doing differently’ Discussion of the personal relevance of these projects, and the resilience and determination of the young people, is important. While all of the projects encountered difficulties in achieving their aims, all of the young people experienced a level of commitment to the project that is important for their own development (a secondary aim of some of the work). Indeed, many of the young people involved in the ARPs in this chapter reflected upon their skills development and progression through their involvement in a project that was personally and subjectively meaningful to them. In this sense, the participation here is not ‘ritualistic’ but, rather, working towards ‘real empowerment’ (xxxxx Xxxxx, 2013, p40). This idea applies to participation that is focused on socio-political change as well as participation which is concerned with practical change-making and indeed, the participation that was explored in other projects. ‘Grassroots groups make democracy anew’ (Blee, 2012, p138) and though their ‘dazzling potential […] is rarely achieved when they seek to alter entrenched structures of power and social inequality’ (Blee, 2012, p138). The internal struggles (e.g. group dynamics) within the groups were limiting, on the one hand, in terms of what could be achieved; however, group reflections and observations within the project suggest that ‘bumping up’ against traditional and normative structures of power and politics were equally, if not more so, prohibitive. A number of themes has emerged, then, about ‘doing politics differently’ and what, for the young people in the projects, participation means and involves. See, for example, the following excerpt from the Islamic Youth Association: Participation in the association is experienced as a personal journey. Participation in this case is meant to be a process of personal enrichment, a process of training and growing up, an individual fulfillment, planned, acted and achieved together with peers. The objective of participation, thus, is to improve one-self, to promote fair values, to find a balance as an individual' (ARRB, p23). An ARP which set out to examine young people’s participation and the meanings that young people ascribed to participation perhaps best sums up these ideas: ‘Participation is a term that is difficult for young people to understand or refers to highly normative responses. So, they express more what they should do rather than what they actually do. Questions about daily prac...
