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The Beauty of White
The Beauty of White
Start date: Jun 17, 2015,
End date: Nov 16, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
The beauty of the white is a youth exchange project which had place in the municipality of Valle de Abdalajís, from 20th to 301st of Agoust 2015. During its 11 days of duration, 32 youngsters aged between 17 and 25 years old coming from rural areas of Spain, Italy, Poland and Slovenia gathered to give value to the rurality against negative stigmas and other difficulties that young people from rural areas have, such as structural difficulties, deficient means of transport and communication, limited job opportunities, ecological disasters etc. All of these agents damage our self steem and hope, making us think that we cannot improve.
Because of these reasons, the result obtained is to change the "negative view of being rural", empowering us as changement agents of our territory. With this project, we realised that we can carry out this projects by our own as well as to contribute to the sustainable development of our environment.
The name of our project also has a symbolic value, because it is refered to the "beauty of the white" of the white color of the lime of the facades of the houses in the little andalusian towns, which has a meaning of beauty, freshness and cleanliness.
In order to achieve this goals, we designed a programme with the "Non Formal Education" and "Experimental Living" methodologies, developed in different activities with the aim of reproduce the daily life in a little town, collecting products of the mountain (as almonds) and working the land and the orchard, cooking, painting the houses with lime, knitting organic fibrs and milking goats. Finally, we proposed a "Great Challenge": to eneryze a summer night in the town for all the local people in order to get funding for a Autism Kids Association. We prepared workshops and artistic performances in relation with the subject of rural living to promote a positive point of view at the same time that we learnt from other rural communities from all our partners. We achieved to spread the european culture and the Erasmus + programme among the young people from rural areas.
The two deliverables of our project go further than material, it change life of the participants as they express in evaluation. On top there were two recognizable products: the Great Challenge and different elements of graphic dissemination that also contributed to promote the value of rural areas. The elements for dissemination were audiovisual productions with interviews to local people about the positive/negative points of view of rural areas and also artistic representations as theatre. The dissemination of results were executed among the local people, welcoming them to the public meetings and work sessions, because we found some difficulties to work through TICs (no wifi available and difficulties with the computers).
We also want to highlight the coordination among different local institutions and collaborating people to implement the project, such as the City Council of the Valle de Abdalajís (who helped us with the organisation and disposal of public places) the Association of Children with Autism (the little economic contribution achieved with the activity "The Barter" were donated to them) and old people who helped us as facilitators of workshops of knitting organic fibers.
Finally, we should hightlight that the benefits of this project have affected in a possitive way the different territories, because we have change some minds, sensitizing about a new paradigm which give us strenght to believe in our resources and ourselves.