Clean City Linköping: Co-designing innovative solutions with young people

Learning points 

In order to make the Clean City initiative work, it was essential to co-design the project with a young person, in order to understand the behaviours, needs and interests of young people. Only with this point of departure is was possible to create compelling incentives for young people that got the message across.

The key success factor of this peer group approach were the incentives. A well-paid summer job for a month is very attractive to young people. The terms of employment also included a number of benefits such as access to a laptop computer with free broadband access, personal mobile phone with a subscription, free lunches and coffee breaks, free ice cream, a free bus card as well as being able to arrange convenient working hours.  All this and a generous wage of 30,000 Swedish Krona per month, paid for by the local association of businesses and property owners.