Barcelona Activa is a forty-year-old, fully municipal economic development agency, working across employment, entrepreneurship and business growth for the whole city — not a youth organisation, and certainly not built for this network's purposes. But within that wider mandate, as Cristina Gil, Director for International Projects and Relations, set out at the start of the session, young people are a stated priority. The webinar focused on three services that show what this looks like in practice. They do not give us the full picture of what Barcelona Activa does — that would take in entrepreneurship support, business growth, gender equality work and much else besides – but what these three examples do is to show, together, a city agency working on space, people and communication at once, for the same group, with each piece built to connect to the others.
There's a moment near the end of the session that's worth holding onto before going through the three services themselves. Asked what she'd learned, or done differently given the chance, Carol Lorenzo, Director for Professional Guidance at Barcelona Activa, said the hardest problem they somehow still face is young people simply knowing Barcelona Activa exists, and trusting it enough to walk in — and that being a public administration makes this harder, not easier, since young people tend to be wary of public institutions to begin with. The three services discussed in the webinar — a youth space called The Convent, a mental-health-aware employment programme called A Prop Jove, and an evolving communications campaign called “Literal” — can each be read as a different attempt to answer that one problem: being found, being seen, and being trusted.
The first answer is space. Until October 2022, Barcelona Activa's youth employment work ran through short, regionally-subsidised programmes aimed at the most vulnerable young people, with fixed activities that didn't flex to individual need. The Convent replaced that with something permanent: a dedicated facility for young people under 30, built to avoid the feel of a jobcentre, with informal spaces instead of reception desks and group-work layouts rather than queues. Access is built to be barrierless — a phone call, a text, or simply turning up, with no appointment needed — and support runs across three tiers of intensity, from quick queries to a fully guided career pathway with a counsellor.
The Convent sits at the centre of nine other locations across the city, picking up referrals whenever young people using other municipal services turn out to need employment support too. Last year around 10,000 young people used it, and more than half found a job within six months. This is a direct answer to a gap the Wish Cities network has named in its own discussions: how poorly most partner cities connect school-age guidance to genuine employment pathways. The Convent doesn't solve that from the schools side, but it shows what a flexible, always-open door can do from the other end.
The second answer is who gets seen at all. A Prop Jove — Nearby — works with young people aged 16 to 35 facing psychological or emotional distress that's getting in the way of work or study. No diagnosis or disability certificate is required; the only criterion is that the difficulty is creating a real barrier. It runs across six community locations, with staff trained in both job placement and mental health, and it operates as what Barcelona Activa calls a second-level service — open to self-referral, but also reachable through the city's mental health centres, primary care services and social services. It traces back to a 2017 council study that found high rates of mental health difficulty among young people who were neither working nor studying.
Last year it supported 256 participants; 62% are now in employment, training, or both. This matters for Wish Cities beyond the numbers, because the network's own founding concern was precisely this — what's been called a mental health epidemic among the young, sitting alongside, and often driving, poor employment prospects. What's distinctive here is the relationship between the two services rather than either one alone: Barcelona Activa doesn't treat broad reach and depth of support as a choice between models — the open door of The Convent can refer someone straight into the targeted service the moment a deeper need becomes clear.
The third answer is reaching people in the first place, which returns directly to Carol's opening admission. Isabel Ponti, Head of Image and Communication, described a communications strategy that has kept adjusting rather than settling. The launch campaign, “Believe”, leaned into the building's former life as a convent, with TikTok taken from zero to close to 10,000 followers. Over time the message shifted: the successor campaign, “Literal”, moved from believing in young people to young people believing in themselves, and from promoting the building to promoting what's actually on offer inside it. Channels were dropped when they stopped earning attention — Twitter, mailing — and budget moved towards where young people actually are, including the city's shared bicycle scheme and buses serving universities.
This pattern — going where young people already are, adjusting language and format rather than expecting people to come to you — echoes something the network has been learning and captured in our ULG engagement workshop in the past year: that disengagement is rarely about disinterest, and far more often about formats that don't feel relevant or credible. Informal, flexible and “go-where-they-are & do-what-they-do” approaches have consistently proved better entry points than formal invitations, in Wish Cities partner cities as much as in Barcelona.
None of this adds up to a template another city could simply lift. What it shows is a way of working that the network would recognise as its own: a deliberately modular response, where a flexible space, a targeted health-aware service, and a communications strategy willing to keep changing each do part of a job none of them could do alone. The numbers — more than half of The Convent participants in work within six months, 62% of A Prop Jove participants in employment or training — are a useful check on whether it's working, but they're a consequence of the connections between the three, not a substitute for understanding them.
The more useful question for other Wish Cities partners isn't whether to build The Convent of their own. It's closer to Carol's own question: do young people in our city know we exist, and what would it take, across everything we already do, to change that?
