Flipping the script on youth engagement

In Hamilton, Ontario, they're turning college classrooms into extensions of city hall. Photo by Avery Rogan, courtesy of City of Hamilton

March 7, 2025

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Young people can be transformative partners to local government. Not only do they possess a font of fresh ideas, but also—because of all the years they have ahead of them—they are the group likely to benefit the most when those ideas are put into action. Yet youth are sometimes among the most challenging communities for leaders to include meaningfully in public problem solving, whether that’s because they don’t think their values are aligned with those of city hall, they don’t trust that they’ll be heard, or they’re simply focused on other pursuits.

That’s what makes a novel approach out of Hamilton, Ontario, so promising. By striking a long-term partnership with local universities to incorporate the creation of new city solutions into students’ everyday coursework—and, critically, embed those students inside city hall—local leaders are forging sustained relationships that inject new ideas into policymaking. In doing so, they are also building youth’s familiarity with, and faith in, local government.

Here’s how things work in Hamilton, and what other cities can learn from their example.

Reimagining pathways to effective engagement.

When Hamilton first set its sights on bolstering youth engagement, it focused on some of the places it could connect with the greatest number of young people: local universities. After years of working with individual institutions in effective, yet often one-off and ad hoc ways, the city saw merit in striking a long-term partnership with its three core schools—Mohawk College and McMaster and Redeemer universities—with the shared aim of integrating students into public problem solving.

“It wasn't that the individual partnerships weren't working,” explains Jay Carter, the Hamilton project manager who leads the coordination of this work. “It was recognizing the value of those partnerships and—especially with this goal in mind—building infrastructure and resourcing around them to ensure their success.”

All four partners committed to a five-year pilot program—including funding, time, and even a physical building next to city hall—to turn the seat of local government into a classroom and the schools into extensions of city hall. This also meant matching some of the city’s biggest challenges with specific professors and courses focused on similar subjects and themes.

Now, with the five-year pilot behind them, this city-university strategy is fully embedded into the way Hamilton works. Students and faculty are working directly with department-level civil servants and have become mainstream actors in the machinery of city hall.

Connecting the dots between youth and city strategic priorities.

Once the city-university structure was in place, the partners could dig into the substance of their collaboration: baking city problem solving into academic work across the three institutions and across all sorts of disciplines, from natural sciences to the humanities to engineering. The model taps into the city’s growing data capacity, which recently earned the Bloomberg Philanthropies What Works Cities Certification (Silver), and includes four steps.

First, city staff identify challenges that fit into local strategic priorities and can benefit from fresh thinking and youth engagement. Then, the city matches those challenges with faculty who have expertise in the subject area at the partner universities. Next, those faculty incorporate the challenges—and the strategic priorities they fall under—into their coursework, so students understand them from the jump. Finally, youth generate ideas and produce deliverables—first for community showcasing and, after piloting, potentially permanent deployment.

As they pursue solutions, students work with city-provided data—including, in some cases and with appropriate safeguards, raw data that has not been made public—so they have a crystal-clear sense of what city residents are experiencing.

“Every single student knows that they're contributing to these three council priorities and that this is how the city is going to change,” says Amanda Malkiewich, director of cooperative education and experiential learning at Mohawk College and a partner with the city in this work.

Demystifying the potential of—and opportunity in—local government.

More than seven years in, 4,100-plus students have dedicated 90,000-plus hours toward creating nearly 250 solutions to address some of Hamilton’s biggest challenges. And a growing number of those solutions are leading to permanent programs.

For example, students were a driving force behind the city’s recent Housing Sustainability and Investment Roadmap, a long-term affordable housing plan that is reimagining how the city finances and acquires land and properties. Another project, which started as an initiative to enhance pedestrians’ use of public space, blossomed into a permanent public-art structure that can be used to close the street to vehicular traffic for special events. Even the projects that don’t get off the ground provide valuable insights, as students see, first hand, all that goes into assembling solutions for the public good.

“It really demystifies the role of government and how folks can get involved in making that change happen,” Carter explains.

By committing to young people in a structured way, connecting them to local strategic priorities, and making the problem-solving process more accessible, Hamilton is doing something special. And it offers lessons for cities everywhere about how to treat youth not just as users or volunteers, but as bona fide contributors to local government.

“Municipal governance can be intimidating. It can feel like it's not accessible,” Carter says. “But we'll work with anyone and everyone who wants to make the city a better place—and we'll find a way to align it to a strategic priority plan or goal.”