Youth Wealth Commons

In France’s working-class neighborhoods and rural areas, a new generation of young people is organizing around education, culture, and social justice, yet they remain excluded from traditional funding systems. Their initiatives are often too informal, too collective, or too rooted in lived experience to fit within conventional grant frameworks. Destins Liés, a non-profit organization led by and for youth from these territories, proposes to prototype the Youth Wealth Commons: a participatory fund designed, governed, and distributed collectively by young people themselves. This prototype aims to serve as a replicable model that other territories can adapt and scale. Beyond redistributing resources, it will train a new generation in both fundraising and grantmaking turning young people from “beneficiaries” into resource mobilizers and organizers of collective wealth.

Our mission is threefold:

1.To financially support the emergence of a decentralized movement of youth collectives across working-class and rural territories : enabling them to mobilize resources together rather than compete for scarce funding.

2.To move beyond a competitive funding logic, by experimenting with cooperative fundraising models that allow collectives to raise and manage funds collectively.

3.To create a shared, peer-led process for allocating funds, where decision-making power lies with young people from marginalized communities, who best understand local needs and priorities.

In this mission, we are inspired by Fund’Action, a pioneering model of participatory grantmaking that emerged from feminist, anti-racist, and grassroots movements across Europe. Fund’Action showed that those directly affected by injustice can and should govern the funds meant to support them. It demonstrated that trust-based, peer-led, and collective decision-making processes not only make funding more equitable, but also more effective.

At its core, this project redefines what “wealth” means in territories where it has long been extracted rather than invested. We believe that the redistribution of financial resources must go hand in hand with the redistribution of decision-making power. By forming a participatory grantmaking model led by young people themselves, we aim to seed a culture of mutual aid, trust, and collective governance.

Our long-term vision is a network of local Youth Wealth Commons across France - autonomous, interconnected, and self-sustaining - proving that when those most affected by inequality control the means of redistribution, a different economy becomes possible.

During the challenge period, we will :

• Take the learnings after having gathered (from september 2025 to december 2025) these young community organizers (aged 18–30) from urban and rural working-class areas in order to respond to their needs ; 

• Design, test, and document a prototype of participatory grantmaking — including selection criteria, collective deliberation tools, and a transparent funding process;

• Pilot the first round of fund allocation to youth-led collectives, ensuring that all decisions are made democratically;

•Share learnings through open documentation, ressources.

By designing, governing, and distributing the fund collectively, young people will not only access resources, they will also learn to steward them. They will become fundraisers, donors, and decision-makers in their own right. The Youth Wealth Commons therefore turns traditional hierarchies upside down : it teaches autonomy where dependency once prevailed, and collective power where individual competition once dominated.

We fundamentally believe in the collective emancipation of young people affected by systemic inequalities and as such, the fund is a tool that allows us to bring together these popular youth and de facto: to create a broader national community of mutual aid. Young people are trained, equipped and supported in the national meetings that we hold, we want to hack the redistribution of wealth by showing them that "the unprecedented is possible".