Twinning in Action
Start date: Sep 26, 2014,
End date: Sep 25, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
CADFA’s work brings young people from Britain and Palestine together in order to promote human rights. Over the past few years, Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association, together with Dar Assadaqa, Abu Dis, has organised annual youth exchanges of hundreds of young people so that they can learn about each other’s lives and challenge discrimination.
The Twinning in Action project will integrate and strengthen this work enormously by training youth leaders from both countries to support and lead youth activities to promote Britain-Palestine ‘twinning. The training will take place in five stages across two years (September 2014 to August 2016). Two of these stages will be practical placements on youth exchanges to the UK and Palestine in three ‘sectors.’ The three sectors are those that CADFA has been working with regularly in the past few years: young people of school age, university students and young women.
The project will begin with a mobility activity for 15 youth workers and a leader from Britain and 9 youth workers and a leader from Palestine. (These numbers will be reversed during the mobility activity for youth workers in Palestine). In October 2014, they will meet in the UK, learn about each other’s country and youth work practice and explore their skills and understandings of working with young people. They will learn about CADFA’s previous exchanges and the project of grassroots twinning. Working in sector groups, they will plan for the project exchange visits to the UK during the following year; they will then lead the preparation, the exchanges and the follow-up work in their own countries.
The youth exchanges will each involve 13 participants from each country plus two leaders. They will use the methods that we have found successful: a residential outside London or Abu Dis followed by time in our base town; using a creative medium that allows an exploration of the differences between the young people’s lives while they work on a common product; a final public display of what they have done; making this part of on-going twinning work.
A second mobility activity for youth workers will take place in Palestine in August 2015. Here youth workers will review and evaluate the exchanges to date and share their experience with youth workers from other areas of Britain and Palestine who will be involved in the second phase of the project. In this way the work will extend beyond Camden and Abu Dis. They will work together to plan the detail of three sector youth exchanges to Palestine in the second year of the project.
The symmetry of the project is important to us, and leaders will be trained to take young people in each direction. Over the two years, the exchanges will be based in different parts of each country, interacting with different local ‘twinning’ groups, while always at the end of the project coming together to London/ Abu Dis where our organisations are based.
The series of creative youth exchanges which are a main part of the project will be exciting learning opportunities for young people and will have an effect far beyond the individuals involved. They will give the young people greater intercultural knowledge and encourage them to challenge discrimination. Each youth exchange over the two years will use a different medium (photography, film, speaking out, art, sport, music). The products of these exchanges will be recorded so they can be shown in a conference at the end of the project.
CADFA has experience of running this number of youth exchanges per year, but this project will integrate them into one overall project which will benefit the youth workers, the young people, our organisation and the area of work. The focused training combined with the opportunity to practice together and review will give youth workers from Britain and Palestine the skills and experience to continue to develop strengthen the grassroots twinning work in schools, youth clubs, universities, women’s and community organisations across both countries.
At the end of the series of exchanges in July 2016 there will be a third mobility activity for youth workers will include fifteen youth workers and a leader each from Britain and Palestine. This will provide a major review of the whole project, discussion of ways to disseminate and future steps. The final step will be a youth conference on Twinning in Action to publicise and disseminate this work to people from across Britain and also from European groups twinning with Palestine.