Why don't young people come to us?

This is the question I am asked most often, and it rarely comes alone. Behind it there is sometimes a territorial cultural plan that mentions students without knowing where to start, sometimes a hundred and fifty staff members from very different professions gathered once a year around a shared topic, sometimes a youth department and a culture department working in the same city without knowing each other. These are not the same talks. What follows is a set of possible directions, so that we can discuss them and build the one that will be useful to your teams.

First direction: what if we had asked the wrong question?

According to Insee, 76% of 16-29 year-olds went on at least one cultural outing in the past year, compared with 38% of those aged 65 and over. The age group whose absence we lament is the one that goes out the most. Their absence, when you observe it, concerns certain specific offers, including yours, not cultural life itself.

This direction devotes the morning to turning the question around: no longer how to get them to come, but what they actually do, and what that teaches us about our audiences in general. Because what 15-25 year-olds start doing becomes everyone’s practice within a few years. Deciding to go out on the day itself, the end of annual subscriptions, programmes people put together for themselves: you have probably already seen these three shifts arrive in your box office. I have developed this argument in Rethinking youth culture and The value of cultural practices for young people.

Second direction: what they do on their screens, and what we fail to see

Digital technology is not one more communication channel; it is the environment where most of their cultural practices take place. What they do there remains largely invisible to anyone who is not there: massive amounts of learning, reading and writing through young adult fiction, online book clubs and fanfiction, social science popularisation that feeds conversations between generations, politicisation in every direction. A young person on their phone may well be writing. I defend this reading and I argue for it, notably in 15-25 year-olds have not deserted politics. It never meets with unanimous approval in a room full of professionals, and that is exactly as it should be: better a disagreement voiced in front of everyone than one saved for the coffee break afterwards.

This direction almost always comes with a moment on psychic life, which I treat without alarmism and without denial. Anses, the French health agency, in its collective expert review of teenagers’ social media use, documents real effects on sleep, anxiety and self-esteem, and shifts attention from screen time to what adolescents actually do online. This is also the position I hold with professionals in care and child protection, in Screens, adolescence and psychic life.

Third direction: our own contradictions

In our professions there is often a considerable gap between what we do with our own evenings and what we would like young people to do with theirs. We do not judge our own screen time, because we know what we do with it. This direction works through humour and through formats where the room looks at itself. It works well when a group already knows itself a little and can laugh at itself without feeling attacked. I have written about this in Not judging people’s digital practices and The paradox of digital criticism.

Fourth direction: an age group is not a taste group

The sociologist Camille Peugny, in “Pour une politique de la jeunesse” (2022), dismisses the idea that an age produces shared tastes. “Young people will love this” means nothing; tastes are formed around fifteen and persist throughout life, and what young people share, across all social classes, is worry about the future. A young person is first of all the product of a social background and a place, and they keep growing older too, which we easily forget when we think in brackets.

This direction opens onto your territory. In rural areas the obstacle is mobility, which in fact exists every week from age fifteen for getting to school, provided transport also exists for everything else. In priority neighbourhoods the obstacle is rather legitimacy, the one expressed as “what would I even do there”, “am I allowed in”, “will I be welcome”. And legitimacy is also at stake among professionals, between the youth department and the culture department. Nobody needs a grant to act on that lever. I have told the story of a city that did in Culture and youth : two professional cultures a city chose to connect.

Fifth direction: giving them a place rather than an offer

In the digital space, everyone is a spectator and potentially an author, a distributor. Our institutions rarely offer that place. Cooperating means taking part in governance; participating means taking part in what others have decided, and our so-called participatory schemes are sometimes more top-down than what young people experience online. A more demanding direction, suited to teams ready to touch their ways of deciding. It draws on Youth as a power relationship, Making Room for Adolescents : Rethinking Our Approaches in Cultural Action and Towards renewed cultural mediation for young people.

A room standing up, in pairs, then at the wall

Whatever the direction, I do not lecture for an hour and a half. I alternate ten-to-fifteen-minute inputs with moments when you get to work. A dozen quick-fire questions answered by standing up or staying seated, and the group’s real communities appear within two minutes: who is under thirty, who is the parent of a teenager, who has TikTok on their phone. Timed exchanges in pairs, where each person puts an idea into words in front of a single other person, which has nothing in common with taking the microphone in front of the whole room. Then a moment of individual writing, and a contribution wall that everyone feeds by photographing their sheet, using a tool we developed at the agency and host on our own servers.

The final discussion then draws on what the entire room has written, not only on the questions of those who dare to take the microphone. At the end of the session I name the methods we have just experienced, because you can reuse them as they are, including with teenagers. They are documented in Collective intelligence facilitation methods, and nothing obliges you to come back to me to use them.

What you keep

The contribution wall and the collective bibliography stay online, for you and for the colleagues who could not be there. If you wish, I turn them into an edited synthesis, ready to circulate within the week, which marks a milestone for the rest of your work on youth. And the horizon I aim for at the end of the morning is not “what should we do in an ideal world”, but “what can I try, where I stand, with the means I have”.

An hour and a half, or the whole day

The most frequent format is a ninety-minute sequence in front of fifty to two hundred people, opening a professional half-day. I also design the whole day with you. The preparation matters as much as the delivery: two or three video calls to understand your situation, your expectations, and the local examples that will anchor the talk. Depending on the subject, I sometimes suggest that another member of the agency speak, alone or with me. And if the right person to talk about youth is on your own team, a head of department, a mediator who knows the ground, I can support them in building and giving the talk themselves [see the page “What if someone from your team did the talking?”, to be linked once published]. Talks are given in French and in English.