Youth Voice, Here and Now!

Youth Voice, Here and Now! is a spin-off project of the Program Youth Voice Romania- more details on Youth Voice Romania Program.

„Youth Voice, Here and Now!” tackles young people’s need to be invested both with the capacity and motivation to get themselves organized and involved in generating positive change on issues related to human rights, specifically no hate speech, youth being considered a vulnerable group that could belong to any discriminated category. Consequently the project aims at developing youth’s capacity and motivation to get organized in order to influence the schools’ policies and to have them as spaces that are not tolerating the hate speech or human rights’ violations.

The aim is being invested with specific activities that offer youth the opportunity to research, to identify and to mobilize human, financial and logistical resources in order to develop their own campaigns on awareness rising on no hate speech policies as well as on the changes that are aiming to generate. For this purpose, youth is mobilizing teachers, their communities’ members and nonprofit groups – indirect target groups of the project – groups that will also acquire the capacity to get involved with the activities that are being developed by youngsters and aim at promoting human rights in schools.

The 50 young people who are part of the 5 initiative groups organized in 5 Bucharest high schools “I.l. Caragiale”, “Gh. Lazar”, “M. Basarab”, “T. Vianu” and “Viilor” had been trained on human rights education and combating hate speech, community organizing, partnership building and working with nonprofit organizations, social media, being part of modules of 3 days training delivered by experienced trainers. The knowledge acquired in the trainings had been used in developing campaigns on combating hate speech in the 5 partner high schools. In order to organize these campaigns, the youth groups met weekly with the community organizers, volunteers in the process and benefiting as well of training on communication, youth work and facilitating group processes.

The campaigns (9 campaigns) had been based on issues identified using participatory action research as methodological approach, the youth groups being as well the researchers in the process – designing research instruments, organizing focus groups. The outcomes of the research process are available in a research study that identified 44 categories discriminated in high schools. The project “Youth Voice, Here and Now!” is co-financed by EEA Grants 2009-2014 – NGO Fund in Romania.

The “Youth Voice, Here and Now!” project was implemented by Partners Foundation for Local Development (FPDL).

The project “Youth Voice, Here and Now!” was co-financed by SEE Grants 2209-2014, through the NGO Fund in Romania. For official information about the SEE and Norwegian Grants access www.eeagrants.org.