CIVITAS Fresh Brains Programme - Mobility Powered by Youth

The CIVITAS Initiative is increasing the participation and contribution of youths to transport and mobility through the CIVITAS Educational Network and the Fresh Brains programme. The Fresh Brains programme offers host organisations a chance to get a fresh and creative viewpoint on their industry’s problems by engaging students through various activities.

The Fresh Brains programme gets host organisations to identify a problem in their industry that they would student input on. The host organisation then creates activities based on this problem which the students can take on and use their creativity to put forward solutions. Once the problem has been identified and activities have been formed, Fresh Brains will release a call for students to apply to the problem statement.

The four main types of Fresh Brains activities are:

1. Internship – students are given individual assignments for 1-3 months professional working experience
2. Hackathon – students work in teams to try and find solutions to problems in the mobility industry over a period of 1-5 days
3. Guerrilla / Tactical urbanism – groups of students plan people-friendly changes to implement on their streetscapes over 2-3 days
4. Urban living lab – groups of 4-8 students plan sustainable solutions for particular locations such as a street, park or underused building. This is over 1-3 months.

To apply, make sure to check out the project calls at this link.

The CIVITAS Educational Network enables cooperation between educational institutes active in the field of urban mobility. The creation of the Network was inspired by the results of a survey conducted by CIVITAS in 2021, which indicated the value of such a network for allowing greater structural cooperation among universities. Launched in early 2022, the CIVITAS Educational Network has rolled out activities in three main domains: Student exchange, knowledge exchange and Joint Master programmes.