Background
The City of Bergamo is working to strengthen both cultural and institutional engagement around its Climate City Contract (CCC), recognising that achieving climate neutrality requires a shared civic culture of responsibility and political accountability across generations. Young people are central to this effort: they are already influential within their families, schools, and communities, and must be supported not only to understand and adopt climate-positive behaviours, but also to contribute actively to shaping and monitoring the city’s transition.
In this context, Bergamo seeks CESF support to develop a “Youth and Children CCC Outreach and Engagement Framework”, for children 6–11, and youth 12–18, not as a one-way communication exercise, but as a participatory empowerment process that builds young people’s capacity to engage with the CCC and relate it to everyday life, fosters long-term civic engagement, and reinforces the foundations of political and civic accountability. The goal is to transform young people into active interpreters, communicators, and disseminators of the CCC, able to translate its objectives into accessible language and locally relevant action, while gradually contributing to how climate efforts are understood, implemented, and monitored within the community.
As part of the NetZeroCities Pilot Project of the 9 Italian Mission Cities, LetsGOv, Bergamo City Council has established a Register of Self-Consumption Configurations for Renewable Energy Sharing (CACER), a new tool designed to promote the creation of Renewable Energy Communities (CER), SelfConsumption Groups (AUC) and individual self-consumption. This digital tool, integrated into Bergamo’s official CCC monitoring platform, For Impact, is complemented by a comprehensive set of guidelines to help organisations, including youth groups and schools, navigate the development of energy communities. These tools provide a natural bridge between climate education and real opportunities for action, offering young people concrete ways to contribute to the city’s energy transition. In parallel, Bergamo is enhancing its governance and coordination mechanisms through the establishment of an Energy and Climate Desk, a service hub for communication, coordination, stakeholder and citizens engagement, awareness raising, and capacity building. This Desk will serve as both a technical advisory service and a cultural interface, linking city-wide communication on energy transition, youth education, and civic engagement through micro-video pills, workshops and public meetings with citizens, professional associations and condominium administrators. The Desk’s Tutor dell’Energia Domestica (TEDs), coordinated by ACLI Bergamo and ManagerNoProfit, already play a key advisory role on energy use and energy poverty and can help amplify youth-focused communication and participation.
About the request
The CESF, through NetZeroCities and Climate KIC, is requesting quotation for support to the City of Bergamo for the design, codevelopment, and enablement of a Youth and Children CCC Outreach and Engagement Framework, together with associated communications materials and capacity-building activities. The supplier’s role will focus primarily on strategic design, co-creation, capacity building, and light-touch implementation support, enabling local actors to deliver and sustain youth engagement activities, rather than on the direct delivery of ongoing engagement or outreach activities.
This assignment aims to go beyond communication materials, and instead to develop a strategic, systemic, and transformative engagement process, across both physical and digital channels, that enables young people to understand, communicate, and act upon Bergamo’s CCC. By strengthening youth engagement and intergenerational dialogue the approach is intended to contribute over time to enhanced civic and political accountability for the city’s climate commitments, rather than to directly deliver accountability mechanisms within the scope of this assignment. The approach considers communication not merely as information dissemination, but as a tool for civic participation, cultural transformation, and longer-term accountability.
The assignment is structured to equip and enable local stakeholders, youth disseminators, and municipal services to carry out engagement activities themselves, with the external supplier providing design expertise, tools, training, and limited accompaniment, rather than acting as a long-term delivery partner. The support will have to propose a pragmatic and scalable approach: instead of creating new engagement structures from scratch, the project will mobilise and connect the community networks where young people already meet and feel a sense of belonging, schools, together with institutional and political structures such as youth councils, NGOs, and national youth and environmental associations, such as Legambiente.
The initiative will therefore operate on two complementary layers:
- Everyday physical and digital engagement spaces, the social, educational, cultural, and faith-based environments where young people naturally interact and develop their personal and civic identities.
- Institutional and civic accountability structures, youth councils, NGOs, and civic organisations that can influence policy and governance.
By linking these layers, the support from the external supplier will create a “network of networks”, bridging formal and informal spheres of participation. By activating these networks, the initiative aims to reach children and young people through channels they trust, creating opportunities for meaningful engagement and co-creation. To reinforce this ecosystem, the support will also design, set-up, and support the initial activation of robust and self-sustaining digital communication channels, aligned with the city’s existing CCC communication efforts. The supplier’s role will focus on the definition of formats, governance arrangements, and initial activation and use of these channels; ongoing content production, moderation, or long-term management beyond the initial activation phase is out of scope of this assignment. Over the longer term, these digital spaces are expected to function as shared civic infrastructures that support continuity, interaction, and accountability, even as young people move between different community spaces or life stages. By strengthening connections across these layers, the support from the external supplier will leverage existing community networks to reach young audiences through trusted intermediaries (“disseminators”), mainly young people, and create a distributed engagement model, reducing dependence on single channels and enhancing continuity, resilience and reach. Additionally, by training and mentoring motivated young people within these networks, the project will enable peer-to-peer education and communication, building local capacity and leadership that lasts beyond the project timeframe.
Another defining aspect of this model will be the emphasis on peer-to-peer learning and youth-led communication. Young people will be trained and mentored to explain the CCC in accessible terms, facilitate dialogue within their networks, and relate climate action to concrete lived experiences (e.g., energy costs, mobility choices, air quality, or comfort in schools and homes). Peer-to-peer empowerment strengthens ownership, trust, and long-term commitment. It also provides a highly replicable model particularly suited to Mission Cities with limited communication or stakeholder engagement capacity, showing how local expertise and social trust can be leveraged to substitute for resource-intensive outreach campaigns.
The request for support applies a theory of change grounded in the principle that:
- If young people are given accessible knowledge about the CCC and the energy transition,
- And are supported to interpret, communicate, and act upon this knowledge within their own networks,
- Then they can become credible messengers, organisers, and accountability partners, amplifying climate awareness, motivating behavioural change, and strengthening intergenerational political accountability.
Finally, to ensure long-term impact, Bergamo requested the inclusion of a dedicated requirement for the external supplier to develop Sustainability and Continuation Recommendations. This will include an analysis of the resources, partnerships, and funding sources needed to maintain and grow the initiative over time, as well as governance arrangements that can anchor youth participation beyond the project period. This will strengthen the systemic value of the CESF intervention and supports replicability among other Mission cities facing similar capacity constraints.
The supplier must ensure visual and narrative alignment between the Youth and Children CCC materials and the Energy and Climate Desk’s communication efforts, leveraging moments when joint communication actions are possible. Key stakeholders include municipal staff, school student councils, educators in parishes and summer camps, associations (e.g. Legambiente, Bergamo Scienza), youth and cultural organisations, and peadiatricians.
Coordination must also take place with NetZeroCities (NZC) experts and the Politecnico di Milano (Polimi), who provide international best practices, national-level support and capacity building, notably through monthly Col’Azioni Climatiche through which the 9 Italian Mission Cities exchange information and knowledge on common challenges. To reinforce cross-learning and long-term relevance, the supplier will also participate in one peer-to-peer session with other Mission Cities and a strategic reflection with Bergamo and NZC specialists on how this CESF initiative will lay the groundwork for a future phase focused on intergenerational political accountability. NetZeroCities’s role will focus on strategic alignment, mentoring and facilitation of cross-city learning, while the selected supplier retains full responsibility for the delivery of the tasks and outputs described in this Scope.
Timeline and additional information
Interested parties are invited to submit their proposals by 27 April 2026 (23:59 CET Time) to Luisa Carretti adn Mateusz Hoffmann [CESF@netzerocities.eu]. Proposals should include and address all specific requirements related to the request which can be found below.
