Aktiv Change Makers

The idea for this project came during the youth exchange “Lets do it outside” in Germany and Norway where some of our participants, for the first time, met people from other cultures who had different customs and habits.

After returning home, we were talking about their experience and decided to write a project together that would focus on understanding and respecting other cultures, helping with integration of refugees and minorities in the society, being active and making positive change in the local community, providing youth leadership and fighting the radicalism and nontolerance that is growing inside Europe.

The main objectives were to:

Empower youth to be more socially responsible and active citizens, on a local and international level, to become change makers in their own local community;
Create a safe environment for participants to share their experiences and culture;
Encourage social cohesion in our local societies leading by example from the youngsters;
Raise the importance of belonging to the European community;
Nurture intercultural exchange, tolerance and solidarity;
Address the problem of growing youth radicalization in Europe, finding the causes and searching for ways to prevent it;
Include people with disabilities and/or people with fewer opportunities in society.
Some specific key action objectives were also to enhance intercultural awareness, to get a more active participation in society and a better understanding of European projects and EU values an last but not least to improve foreign language competences.

The project also aimed to emphasize the importance of solidarity and unity in Europe and to give a chance for youngsters from 6 different countries and cultures to meet, talk to each other, share their experience and learn from each other. We also wanted to address the growing radicalization in Europe and intolerance against refugees and minorities.

Main activities were workshops about how to be active in the field but also about prejudices regarding the different countries and in the countries, an intercultural evening were people could learn about the different countries as well as workshops about the burning issues of each country and how wonderful things could be in an Utopie.