WeAreOne | Youth Exchange

Dates: 12-21 November 2018

Venue: Berlin, Germany

Organizer NGO: Euro-Med Youth Federation

Project Description

The objective of WeAreOne is to empower youth through community involvement and grassroots inter-cultural movements to promote social inclusion of refugees, migrants, and of those of different backgrounds than their own.

Within our project we aimed to inspire youth to create inter-cultural open spaces in local communities, and to be involved in the service of all people who reside with them, those from all backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions. Because of the multi-activity design of the project, we wanted to stimulate a complete educational process and we strive for long-term project outcomes that will last far beyond the last day of activities.

Therefore, our project divided into 5 phases:

1. Initial preparations prior to the first activity
2. Youth Exchange taking place in Germany, young people aged 18-29 (32 participants of 8 participated organizations) + 8 group leaders with no age limit, and the activities took place in Berlin, where we focused on:

– Analyzing the current involvement of young people in local communities especially the youth with fewer opportunities.

– Exploring inter-cultural obstacles and barriers to youth social actions and ways to overcome them.

– Identify innovative tools and best practices and methods, which can be transferred to youth local actions.

– Form teams from participants to make research and observations in their local communities upon their return home, in order to find useful insights and opportunities for social actions.

3. In between the first and the second activity participants made research and observation in their local communities to find useful insights of social and cultural opportunities.
4. The second Exchange in Napoli (Italy), the same participants’ number and criterias, explored contemporary refugee and migrant related challenges in Europe and inter-cultural community actions together with grassroots movements for improvement of social wellbeing.

– Explore the migration policy of the EU and the involvement of civil society in the process.

– Encourage the contribution of youth in integration and social inclusion of the migrants and refugees into their communities.

– Gather insights, learning, inspirations, and experience into project ideas.

– Equip participants with knowledge, skills, and attitudes to enable them to develop social and intercultural youth projects.

– Develop ideas and social initiatives and put them into action.

Through the projects we helped youth to reach their full potential through various workshops, discussions, games and simulations, which provide training and valuable experience to youth and support their future hiring process. Overall the goal of the project was to level out inequality and exclusion, thanks to the active engagement of young people.

In order to achieve that, we showed young people the paths to build their own active communities and to equip them with the skills and knowledge necessary to take the action.

42 participants from Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Romania, Turkey and Lithuania gathered for the activity.

This project organized by The Euro-Med Youth Federation. Euro-Med Federation is a non-profit organization based in Berlin, Germany, seeking to create “network of networks” for cooperation in all Euro-Mediterranean countries; established by youth initiatives, NGOs, workers, and activists who are working in the field of youth empowerment and sustainable development.