Ask my kids what they think of their town and you’ll get an honest answer in about four seconds. They won’t mention footfall or vacancy rates. They’ll tell you if there are any good cafés to hang out with their friends, whether there are some decent clothes shops, and whose parents they last saw on the high street.

It’s a different audit to the one most placemaking strategies run, but it’s arguably the one that matters most over time. Pride in Place is sometimes managed by an older demographic of place leaders without input from the next generation of residents. Yet if a programme doesn’t speak to the people who’ll inherit our towns and cities, it risks becoming a programme without a legacy.

So here’s the uncomfortable question: are we building Pride in Place for the town as it is, or for the town as the next generation will need it to be? Those aren’t always the same project.

One version is measured against how a place is performing today – presentable streets, clean retail units, footfall to drive trade. The other is measured in something much harder to put in a slide deck. Do young people feel empowered? Can they access opportunities? Do they grow up with a feeling that the place is theirs to shape rather than something being done to, or for them?

These questions are more important now than ever. Telling someone in their late teens or early twenties simply to ‘support local’ rings hollow when they have little to no chance of owning a house in the same place they live, let alone opening a local shop of their own. Young people today are dealing with real economic pressures and a lot of them have quietly concluded that nobody with any power is looking out for them.

Which is why we need to address this problem and fast. Only this week, the House of Lords Built Environment Committee published a letter describing young people as untapped potential in the built environment, and calling on government to pull together the patchwork of youth and placemaking initiatives into something more coherent rather than leaving good practice scattered and unrepeated. Elsewhere, projects like UK Youth’s social action programmes have shown what happens when young people are simply handed a real budget and left to run with it, results that outperform anything achieved by consulting them and then deciding on their behalf. The ingredients for doing this properly already exist. What’s missing, more often than not, is the will to hand over something with real stakes attached.

As place leaders, we need to think creatively around what we can do to give young people a ‘hand up’. We actually need to give the responsibility to young people to manage and spend Pride in Place budget. It’s not good enough to just allocate funds for a new skate park and then move on to the next agenda item. Where are the pop-up shop schemes, budget for youth-led events, heritage tours created through digital workshops, and local mentor programmes?

Pride in Place shouldn’t just be about delivery today, but delivery tomorrow. Pride is built through small, repeated community connections where people, of all ages, feel part of their town or city. Showing the next generation that they’re genuinely part of the decision making, even on something small like what fills an empty retail unit or what an events calendar looks like, says something a ‘support local’ poster never can.

To give Pride in Place a legacy, we have to ask something of the community in return. With young people especially, don’t just ask for their attention, ask for their participation.