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Let’s act together in European Young Laboratories..
Let’s act together in European Young Laboratories
Start date: Oct 1, 2014,
End date: Jun 30, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
The EuYoungLabs project, leaded by the Isernia Municipality (IT), involves 2 other organizations that are the Youth Centre Velenje (SI) and the City of Vodnjan – Dignano (HR). The project, lasting 21 months, comes from the idea that the youngster generation nowdays don't feel represented by the political institutions at local, national or political level. In fact, they don't feel to play an active role in the democratic life of the country they live and these kind of feelings increase more and more the existing gap between youngsters and institutions. Local and regional authorities, as they are the closest authorities to the youngsters, have a very important role to play in promoting youth participation, because they can pose the basis for allowing youngsters to practice actively democracy and citizenship.
Starting from this problem, the project aims at fostering actively the youth participation in the local and European contexts, for promoting, in particular, the conscious participation of young people in local political life, as well as in the European one. So, the young people involved will have the opportunity to express themselves and their opinions, to have a confrontation at local and European level. They will be invited to discuss and comment on topics of their interest, such as environmental protection of their territory, social inclusion and volunteering and sport promotion in order to have a dialogue with field experts and decision-makers and give voice to their ideas and proposals.
The project will set up two transnational seminars to be held in Italy with the participation of 90 youngsters coming from Italy, Croatia and Slovenia. During the preparation phase will be selected the schools to be involved and the beneficiaries, will start the confrontation at local level on the proposed themes, will be selected the mentors, realized local meeting, defined dissemination strategy, set up training activity. Proper communication and dissemination tools and activities will support the whole project implementation.
Thanks to the two transnational meetings, it will be fostered the dialogue among the youngsters and encouraged their initiative and active participation through the realization of an intercultural learning experience. The youngsters involved, thanks to the participation to the EuYoungLabs project will also acquire different informal skills such as the consciousness of cultural differences and how they affect communication; how to work in a team strengthening the individual development process; how to be active and sensitive towards the needs of local communities; getting more conscious about structures, values and rules of civic society, in particular how to influence the decision making process regarding youth policies and democratic processes within local, national, European communities.
The youngsters will communicate in English throughout the duration of the project, so they’ll improve their skills in foreign languages and also their digital competences by managing information in the webpages and social network. Moreover, they will have the possibility to acquire knowledge about the topics discussed during the preparatory phase that is: environmental protection of their territory, social inclusion and volunteering and sport promotion. Youth decision-makers will have the chance to increase attention and awareness as regards the policies aimed at new generations and to the issues managed such as young people active citizenship and participation in democratic life. Cooperation could be increased among youth policy-makers to exchange idea and suggestions for a better involvement of the youngstets in the decision-making process and definition of youth policies benefitting of the EuYoungLabs’ methods and results. As a longterm impact a bigger network could be set up of European organizations strictly linked and sensible to youth policies issues, willing to work together to improve the future of youngsters concerning in particular their skills towards democratic processes and active citizenship within communities to which they belong at local/national and European level.
The transnational events will allow different forms of discussions and will be managed through strategies of informal education, that will enable the youngsters also to acquire more skills and knowledge. They will be events involving young people and policy makers/ experts of youth policies to discuss, exchange ideas and best practices and / or follow recommendations on issues, priorities and objectives of the structured dialogue, the open method of coordination in the field of youth and the European Pact for Youth.
The events will reflect the organized dialogue, which is the base of youth policies at European level, and it will focus on topics like young people active participation/citizenship at Eu level.