Five brunches, one neighborhood

BRUSSELS — Young people are often described as the future. They are less often trusted with the present.

In Matongé, a densely woven quarter of the Ixelles municipality in Belgium, neighbors trace their roots to scores of other countries. Here, a group of young people—aged twelve to fifteen—gave many of their afternoons this past year to a kitchen. Every two months, they prepared brunch for the neighborhood.

“We do this so people can get to know each other,” said one of the young cooks. “So the neighborhood feels a little closer. Some people don’t have enough to eat, and this helps. And we like cooking.”

The story begins, improbably, with litter. A year and a half ago, participants in the neighborhood’s Bahá’í community-building initiatives joined a national public clean-up day. So many young people arrived that municipal officials—who had not realized how many of them were active together in the area—grew curious.

That curiosity led to a meeting between the youth and municipal officials, and to a longer conversation about the community-building efforts that had been under way in Matongé for four years.

Some months later, a notice in the municipality’s magazine announced that a youth council was being formed for young people aged twelve to fifteen. The group decided to go. When the first meeting was held, they found they were the only young people who had shown up!

“The municipality had many good ideas, but often found it hard to connect them with people,” said Neysan Khabirpour, an Auxiliary Board member in Belgium who works with the group.

Over the following months, the young people worked with municipal staff on a range of small projects, until, in effect, they had become the youth council itself. It was there that they learned about the participatory budget, a fund residents can draw on to propose initiatives that serve the neighborhood.

The facilitators of the youth group put a question to them, one they often return to: what are your talents, and how might you draw on them to serve others? The answer came without much deliberation. They liked to cook.

With support from older youth and adults, the group shaped an initiative they described simply as “by the youth, for everyone.” Residents voted for the proposal, and a modest sum from the participatory budget covered ingredients, equipment, and decorations.

At each brunch, sixty or seventy people filled the room. Some were families the youth already knew. Others were neighbors stepping through the door for the first time. Over food prepared by the youth, they spoke about matters affecting life in the neighborhood—from friendship and bullying to education, the environment, and social cohesion.

Cooking was only the beginning

The brunch itself lasted the morning. Getting there took days. On Wednesdays after school, the group shopped for hours. On Fridays, they stayed into the evening to prepare food and decorate the hall. On Saturdays, they arrived at nine in the morning—evidence, Mr. Khabirpour observed, that ownership can sometimes do what alarm clocks cannot. The funding may have covered the groceries, but the young people supplied the hours.

“At first we get nervous that we won’t finish, or that something will go wrong,” said one participant. “Then the brunch begins, everything comes together, and we see people eating. That part is really nice.”

The cooking did not always go smoothly. There were occasional disagreements over who did what and whose way of doing it was best. A kitchen, after all, is a small place in which to discover big differences of opinion.

“Being in a kitchen with several people is not easy,” said one of the young organizers. “Everyone has their own way of doing things. But we learn to work together, to live together and it strengthens friendship. Most of the time.”

Some lessons came only through doing. Standing before sixty guests to present a theme proved harder than any recipe. Instead of giving a presentation, the youth began posing a question and inviting the room to break into small groups, gathering again afterward to share what they had found. The conversations grew richer for it.

Elisa, a longtime resident who came to three of the brunches, remembered the early days fondly. “The first one wasn’t easy for them,” she said, “but each one after that got better and better.” What stayed with her was the mix of people around the tables. “I met Moroccan, Dutch, and other neighbors I never usually see—from the eldest among us all the way down to babies.”

For Mr. Khabirpour, the experience reflected a conviction at the heart of Bahá’í educational efforts: young people are not merely getting ready to contribute some day. They already possess capacities that can develop when they are trusted with meaningful responsibility and opportunities to serve.

Working with the municipality

The brunches also grew out of a question the community had been asking for some time: how might residents, neighborhoods, and the municipality work together?

“As residents, we can easily find ourselves asking only what the municipality should do for us,” said Mr. Khabirpour. “Why aren’t they doing more? We began to ask another question: what is our responsibility, and how might we work alongside them?”

One father in the neighborhood put it in his own terms. Early on, he admitted, he had been quick to notice what the municipality was not doing. Now, he said, “we are among those doing it.”

That shift did not go unnoticed. When the municipality gathered the recipients of the participatory budget to present their different projects, one man approached this group afterward. He told them he had begun to lose hope in the younger generation. Watching them speak, he said, had given him hope again.

The project was of a fixed duration and eventually ended. It had never been meant to become a permanent initiative. What mattered was what it left behind: stronger relationships, growing confidence among the young organizers, and a clearer sense of what can happen when generations do not merely speak about each other, but work side by side.

What remains is a neighborhood that has watched its young people identify a need and young people who now know how they can respond to it.