Echoboard – Driving Social Innovation through Young People

Young Social Innovators (YSI) is Ireland’s largest youth led social innovation charity/NGO supporting over 15,000 young changemakers annually. Our new Echoboard is a sentiment dashboard that enables young changemakers to better understand the key social and environmental issues that impact them at a micro (local community) and macro (national) levels. By better understanding the views and opinions of young people, they are empowered to better co-design social innovations leading to solutions and targeted positive impact.

Our session will give a background to work that we have undertaken in Ireland with the support of the Irish Government and how it aligns to both the UNs core principle of “leave no one behind” and our inclusion in the current Irish governments Programme for Government in which they are committed to: “support the work of YSI to make the social innovation space accessible to all young people, create new future pathways and allow our youth to have their voices heard.”

Our session will give participants insights into our recent work, what we have found and a live demo of our current Beta version. We also invite participants to undertake a short co-design session to gain their feedback and thoughts to develop a wider global plan for collaboration and future partnerships.

Also, as part of this session we will highlight our plans through recent Erasmus+ funding to work alongside our Spanish/Basque partners ALC in the development of a wider EU wide framework for a future EU sentiment dashboard which will be presented to the EU commission in February 2026. We would like to extend an invitation to other interested parties within the EU for future development of this platform.

The main takeaway from this session will be “the global potential to drive social innovation through data (sentiments) and our next generation of changemakers.”