CO-CREATE is a research project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program, aiming to reduce the prevalence of overweight and obesity among adolescents in Europe by working directly with youth to co-create obesity preventative policies and promote action among relevant stakeholders.  Through this project, young people are empowered to identify and formulate relevant policies, assess such policies with private and public actors, and promote tools and strategies for implementation. This is done in part through dialogue with relevant stakeholders, known as the Dialogue Forum. 

The Dialogue Forum is an opportunity for intergenerational, multi-stakeholder dialogue to discuss policy ideas developed by young people in the CO-CREATE Youth Alliances. The Forum is also an opportunity to identify individual and collective actions that participants can take advance the policy idea and address the broader issue. In the past year, CO-CREATE youth have met with local and national stakeholders across Europe through Dialogue Forums. We are now scaling up and inviting youth and stakeholders to participate in a joint CO-CREATE Dialogue Forum and UN Independent Food Systems Summit Dialogue.  

The main objective of the Dialogue Forum is to discuss and refine policy ideas developed by CO-CREATE youth and to share, learn, connect and commit to collective action. The collaborative nature of the Dialogue Forum encourages participants to share their individual perspectives, expertise, and lived experience to co-create a more informed policy idea(s) and explore how it can be advanced.  

Through the CO-CREATE Youth Alliances, young people from across Europe have developed policy ideas to build healthier food and physical activity environments for children and adolescents. These ideas are the forefront of young people’s demands to EU policymakers to build healthier food and physical activity environments, as outlined in the CO-CREATE Youth Declaration. During the Dialogue Forum, two policy ideas from the Declaration will be discussed:  

• Restrict all marketing of unhealthy foods to children under the age of 18 years  

• Secure all children access to high-quality, practical food/nutrition education in school and access to a healthy school cafeteria