The European Lead by Nature Network (ELNN) https://www.elnn.eu/ is a collaborative initiative uniting European youth organizations, funded by the European Union. Central to ELNN’s vision is building a sustainable, inclusive community where youth shape their own learning experiences. This bottom-up, participatory ethos underpins the project’s second work package (WP2), which emphasizes high-quality, research-informed educational design.

ELNN Research aims to understand young people’s needs, motivations, and future orientations, ensuring that training materials and methodologies align with their lived realities. In practice, this means prioritizing research as a prerequisite for developing effective, context-sensitive non-formal education. However, a core challenge has surfaced: lack of youth engagement. Despite efforts to involve a broad audience via Discord, social media channels, and localized outreach in multiple languages, participation rates have fallen short of expectations. Without robust engagement, it becomes increasingly difficult to generate the insights needed for truly participatory training design.

This paper explores the tension between the aspiration for bottom-up co-creation and the practical hurdles of limited youth involvement. It draws on lessons from ELNN’s attempts to host onsite and online ethnography, and social media campaigns. By examining why these efforts have struggled to captivate the target group, the paper seeks to reimagine more effective approaches for engaging youth. Specifically, it questions how educational programs can be genuinely co-created if participants are reluctant to join the research that would surface their core interests and preferences.

In highlighting both the successes and setbacks of ELNN’s engagement strategies, this paper offers insights into designing participatory non-formal education that remains faithful to young people’s voices, even when immediate research participation proves challenging. Ultimately, it calls for innovative, youth-centered strategies to help educators and researchers forge deeper, more meaningful connections with their audiences.

Keywords: Youth, research, participatory approach, non-formal education, community building.