Day 9 - Follow-up and evaluation

Today is the last day. We are a little sad, but grateful for the opportunity. We had an amazing experience during these nine days, sharing ideas with wonderful people from all over Europe. We've learned so much, had so much fun. But now, it ends.

We spent the morning looking forward to the future, planning our follow ups back home. Then, we had a discussion, helping each other to improve.

Next, we took advantage of the multiculturalism in our group and found topics we were passionate about. In small, international groups, we made the first steps towards new projects on topics like gender equality, citizenship and culture. We were our own monitors, providing feedback at the end and support. Those of us who found more than one project they liked, could easily go about joining them. By now, we are all a big team.

One of the best moments of our training took place today. One of the participants, Parvi, shared her experience as a psychotherapist and held a gestalt therapy session with us. It was intense and demanding, a truly unique moment.

The afternoon brought with it reflection time. Half laughing, high on the feeling of the last hours, we analysed what we had learned; our project made us more European, more involved, more aware - everything we had wanted it to. It was a bitter-sweet moment.

Now, in the last hours, we are trying to finish up, say goodbye. We get our Youthpass, make invitations to see each other again and write a last page. It's cheesy, but true. We'll miss our time here. Little by little, we built the foundation of a much larger movement we will take with us. But here, our time together ends.

     

( Don't worry:  We'll finish happy, with a party)

Day 8 - Workshops in Valga

Day 8 was one fun and important day in our project. We got to visit another Estonian town while practicing the skills we gained in the training so far, through facilitating the workshops we prepared with our groups for the students from Valga high school.

Coming back to the base, where we talked about our experiences in the classrooms and our learnings, we finished our working day with a wonderful magic show performed by our fantasic colleague Francisco.

Day 6 - Day in Tartu

Good Morning, Tartu!

We set off to a long day full of excitement and adventures in the second biggest city of Estonia. Tartu is often considered the intellectual centre of the country, especially since it is home to the nation's oldest and most renowned university. The city also houses the Supreme Court of Estonia and the Ministry of Education and Research.

Our first stop was a meeting with the lawyer who is an expert within the field of Hate Crime. She gave as a very valuable inside of the legal perspective of the topic and differentiated theory from practice. To make us even more engaged with the subject of Hate Speech and Human Rights, we were divided into teams that role played a courts case. Every group was given different real-life event of discrimination and between themselves had to distribute the roles of prosecution, defense and judge. The exercise was very thought-provoking and the outcome was really fruitful as it made everyone genuinely adopt the roles of the criminal justice agents.

This was followed by a lunch in a fancy restaurant down-town Tartu and a pleasant relaxing coffee break in a local coffee shop. Afterwards was the free time when each participant had the opportunity to explore the city and soke authentically its atmosphere.

Day 5 - No hate speech

We started the morning with meeting our learning buddies. In case the buddy was late, additional energizer was to get your buddy. After that we had discussion about the movie from previous night and trainer gave us more background details what happened in Rwanda and how actually hate speech resulted in genocide. 

Next we had exercise to recognize the cases of hate speech and we could discuss them in small cycles.

Later on we did a role play, where some of us were refugees, others border officials, observers and security. This helped us to better understand the point of view of different counterparts and put ourselves in refugee shoes. After that we shared our emotions and also discussed  current situation in Europe, where is so much hate speech and tried to think of solutions what we could do to stop hate speech and discrimination towards refugees. 

Evening was for the intercultural night, with magic tricks, quizzes, dances and great food :)

Day 4 - Sharing is caring

We are on our way

 Day 4

 Fourth day started with rain and then started snowing.

 But it didn’t changed our mood, conversely some of us were

 happy to see snow in Estonia.

Our topic continued and we had fun with our morning cafeteria.

    After our morning session we watched movie. Someone felt sadness,

for someone it was okay. For conclusion, this movie was connected

with topic and it is good that our trainers had shown it for us.

Finally, it’s SAUNA TIME!

We were talking and having fun.

Best way to relax after hard day :)

Day 3 - And so it begins!

Another day started and with it, the excitement of finally starting the topic of the training!

After energizers, we went directly to finish discussion about the 8 key competences of Youth Pass and what it's about.

This showed that not only people are here to learn about "No Hate Speech" but also they are here to learn to how to learn :)

And finally, the Human Rights and No Hate Speech topic started!
As a way to approach people, everyone shared when or why they got interested in this topic and what brought them to Estonia.

This resulted in a very dynamic discussion about many concepts and their definitions.

 And it was amazing to see how passionate people were!

For the end of the day, we had the presentations of 4 countries that are participating:

Slovakia, Spain, Germany and Romania!

Food, drinks, fun facts and interesting facts! We believe everyone stayed with something about these countries on their memories!

Almost forgot to mention, through out the night, dancing was the main action in our group!

Amazing! :)

Day 1 - "We all are going to be star shining like a constellation in the training course"

First day:

So after a long day what do you write when there is a beautiful landscape waiting for you? 

And of course the unknown experience of  a new training course?

The funny games you played this morning to know other persons better? The coffee break with beautiful lake on ice and warm sun caressing you  with its gentile rays?

And the crazy afternoon in Otepää? Who were amazed with the availability of the Mayor? Who didn't take a picture with the Bear Guy? And what about the kid whit 12 years spoke English perfectly?? And we are sure that the police lady will be on our mind for a while with her friendly NO!!!(irony)

Today we met people that we hope that would be our friends during and long after this training course ends. People with good histories to tell, funny people, cool people, people with talent, we've got everything J

And now, we know what to write, now that we are in the intercultural night dancing, learning and laughing, we realize in the dark of the video presented, we realized that we are stars and with our shiny personality we will light the constellation of this new training course J

"Stop Feeling Sorry, Start Acting!" introduction

Welcome to our project blog! Let us give you a short overview of the project!

Summary:

Mobility of youth workers: training course

Organized by: Seiklejate Vennaskond – ESTONIA

Funded by European Union Erasmus+ programme (key action 1 )

Project dates: 10th -20th April 2016

The general aim of our project is to combat hate speech online and offline.

Specific objectives are:

• To Increase the competencies of youth workers to recognize hate speech and human rights abuse and combat it in youth work
• To acknowledge the dangers of hate speech for youth and democratic values
• To introduce youth workers Bookmarks/Compass as a tool to work on hate speech and human rights with youngsters and provide them with useful methods
• To empower youth workers to stand up for human rights offline and online
• To share good practices of anti-hate speech actions in participating countries
• To create new initiatives on local and international level to combat hate speech.

36 participants have come together for this project from 10 different countries (United Kingdom, Greece, Romania, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria, Spain, Slovakia, Germany and Estonia).

We plan to use non-formal methods, such as group work, role-play, simulations, reflection, online research, movie, work in pairs, practical workshops, activity in town etc. After the project participants will carry out workshops in their local communities.