Living Room
Start date: May 3, 2016,
End date: Jul 2, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
LIVING ROOM brings together youth workers from four cultural centers of the city of Bordeaux, specialized in music (amateur practices, transmission, youth coaching ...) who see in the appropriation of cultural places by young people a way to fight the phenomena of religious radicalization. These workers (youth workers, teachers, animators, artists) have identifed problems and difficulties in their professional practices which are an obstacle to the inclusive role that could represent the cultural centers in which they work:- A worrying evolution of behavior: religion becomes a recurring theme of conflict in the collective life, some Muslim teenagers accompanied during school time have a formal ban to go into the concert halls, they are regularly confronted with hate speech and radicalization, worried parents are calling the youth workers ...- The methods of mediation used to animate the living areas, welcoming and inclusive, and taking into account the intercultural diversity of the neighborhoods in which they work, have become obsolete.Currently invested in redevelopment of the premises where they work, the youth workers want to adapt these places to the needs of youth and not let a gap be installed between young people and rooms. For that, they want to renew their practice and develop their skills by going to the Maison de la Création in Brussels and to the Red House Centre for Culture and Debate in Sofia because they have specific expertise in these areas. These structures have caught their attention because they have the distinction:- To be places of life and civic participation for youth- To develop their activities towards young people of great social, ethnic and religious diversity- To train their teams on the religious conflict mediation and support for young people leaving the social contractLiving Room allows partners to discover, meet, develop their skills in order to develop new skills to meet current challenges faced by youth workers. Its objectives are to- Devise new practices to implement in cultural places- Share and put into perspective their expertise including English- Define, with partners, the basic framework of a cultural cooperation project for young people affected by religious radicalization and inter-religious dialogue difficult.The mobilities involve a team of 14 youth workers, invested in the reorganization and mediation places and made up of the coordinator of the SMAC network Agglo, 3 directors, 6 cultural mediators and 4 young people involved in mediation and dynamic intercultural dialogue among rooms. Preoccupied by transmission and diversity within the teams, the group is made of mixed (7 men, 7 women) and intergenerational (young 4, 5 persons between 30 and 40 years, 5 person over 40 years) participants.Participants will visit and exchange pratices in Brussels from June the 13 to the17 and then to Sofia from 5 to 9 September 2016. To meet the project objectives, each mobility has been designed in three stages by the partners: visiting open cultural places, doing dynamic activities of exchanges between teams (brainstorming, world café and expert panel) on religious radicalization and mediation tools to mobilize, meetings with other European youth workers to broaden their range of methods and form an informal network of youth workers.LIVING Room will have a tangible impact in the daily life of the youth workers from the SMAC d'Agglo network. On a personal level, it will allow them to enhance their expertise, to be more comfortable in the international exchange of skills. On a professional level, they can more easily handle difficult cases of youth radicalization, and reorganize their workspaces towards youth.In the short term, the new skills acquired by the teams will :- develop the dialogue between young people from different backgrounds- allow to welcome more specific audiences- give greater visibility to the halls and their actions in the field of professional integration.After the LIVING ROOM project, the partners hope to develop a cultural cooperation project for youth in priority neighborhoods faced with radicalization issues. It will be conducted with European networks ( IETM ... ENCC ) .