📋 Tender Overview
Grant agreement ID: 101308662
DOI
10.3030/101308662
EC signature date
10 July 2026
Start date
1 September 2026
End date
31 August 2029
Objective
IMAGINE shifts Europe’s approach to preventing and countering youth crime from reactive responses to proactive, evidence-based and rights-compliant action. It fuses social sciences and technology within a co-creative methodology involving LEAs, CSOs, schools and youth services. It will design and validate an AI-enabled Gamification & Digital Storytelling (GDS) toolsuite, integrating purpose-built serious games and interactive learning experiences, that safely mirrors real-world recruitment, social grooming and escalation across online and offline settings. These experiences strengthen empathy, self-regulation, bias awareness, de-escalation and multi-agency cooperation, while ensuring strict child-safeguarding, privacy-by-design and fundamental-rights protections.
IMAGINE will run pilots in three EU countries, blending mixed-methods evaluation with privacy-preserving telemetry to identify what works, for whom and under which conditions. Evidence will feed uniform practitioner curricula, train-the-trainer packages and actionable policy options on counter-recruitment, early intervention, restorative approaches and multi-agency governance. To extend reach and accelerate uptake, IMAGINE includes cascade funding: 5-10 third-party LEAs/NGOs/CSOs will receive sub-grants to test and validate innovative approaches in diverse local contexts, enabling complementary validations and seeding replication beyond core sites.
By translating empirical insight into practical, scalable tools and guidance, IMAGINE empowers practitioners, educators and youth to recognise and resist harmful dynamics early, and to rehearse safe responses in controlled environments. It also reinforces trust between institutions and communities by aligning training and awareness with European rights frameworks. The result is a clear pathway from innovation to impact, strengthening preparedness and delivering measurable gains in the early prevention and diversion of young people from crime across the EU.
