HOW TO BUILD A YOUTH WING

“IT’S WORTH ALL THE HOURS
OF VOLUNTARY WORK –
ESPECIALLY DURING TIMES
OF ELECTION”
The start-up and development of the youth wing has become Rasmus Brygger’s
passion. It is a “laboratory for learning” and takes up all his time. Summing
up he has four major lessons learned. And one huge achievement!
“Above everything it is a lot of fun and once you have started
you just want to get it all up and running and reach your targets.”
Rasmus Brygger is the present chair of the youngest Danish
youth party, The Libertarian Youth. And if the members allow
him to do it, he will continue his mission for at least some years
to come. So far, his most important pieces of advice are:
1. When starting up don’t underestimate the importance of
your systems and your internal communication. When we first
launched the party there was obviously a great deal of hype
around us and a lot of new members were attracted. But we did
not have the proper systems in place, neither the IT – to register – nor our lines of communication.
This was a mistake, and this way we lost a lot of members. These days, I spend most
of my time on organizational issues and our focus is on retaining members far more than on
recruitment.
2. Define your political foundation and the line of the party very quickly. If you don’t have a
clear line you can’t expect the local committees to follow it. And this is really crucial. Otherwise
you will find yourself in a lot of confusion and there will be too many mixed messages
reaching the public. Even when local committees run their smaller campaigns and communicate
with the local press the messages have to be consistent and in line with the overall
political position and line.
3. Be a copycat. Have a good look at other youth wings in your country and internationally.
Don’t spend a lot of time inventing something already figured out by others. See how they
communicate and do it better. See how they make campaigns and do it better. And cooperate
with them whenever it is possible. We have established a set of training activities for our local
branches in cooperation with another youth wing – not our closest competitor though – we
save a lot of resources carrying out these more random activities together
4. Encourage the teamwork. In our case, it was tempting in the beginning to direct the responsibility
for different tasks to one single person. This is not recommended because people
leave, travel and you find yourselves without knowledge about important parts of the organization.
Encourage teamwork because this also gives added quality and value to the work.
The major achievement was definitely the collaboration with the mother party that led to
the greatest success of the Libertarian Youth: During the 2011 elections the most liberal party
of Denmark came into parliament with nine mandates. We went from zero to nine out of
179. It was marvelous, and the work we did as a youth wing made an enormous difference.
HOW TO BUILD A YOUTH WING DANIsH INsTITUTe fOr pArTIes AND DemOcrAcY pAGe 17