Project Reference: 2022-1-DE04-KA152-YOU-000066296
Topics: Preventing Racism And Discrimination – Bridging Intercultural, Intergenerational And Social Divide
Action Type: Mobility of young people
Countries Covered: 🇩🇪 Germany 🇷🇸 Serbia 🇲🇰 North Macedonia 🇵🇱 Poland 🇹🇷 Türkiye 🇮🇹 Italy
Summary
Objectives
The partners together with young people involved in the activities of their organizations decided to prepare youth exchange ‘Forum Theatre as Way of Building Socially Inclusive Communities’ with the aim to provide young people, especially newcomers, an opportunity to explore the issues such as stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and social exclusion through forum theatre and to increase their motivation contribute to creating socially inclusive communities.
Objectives of youth exchange ‘Forum Theatre as Way of Building Socially Inclusive Communities’:
a) To develop participant’s competencies in the areas of addressing stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and social exclusion;
b) To increase their understanding of the impact of negative stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination and social exclusion on youth development;
c) To raise their awareness on the situation of young people facing stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and social exclusion with the aim to increase their empathy and encourage them to be actively involved in the process of creating socially inclusive communities;
d) To give the participants an opportunity to get familiar with technique of Forum Theatre and directly to experience the process of creating Forum Theatre addressing issues such as stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and social exclusion;
e) To raise awareness of young people from participating communities on issues addressed by youth exchange through a series of Forum Theatre events;
f) To realize Forum Theatre events in each participating community and during youth exchange itself;
g) To raise intercultural competencies of the participants by giving them an opportunity to interact and work with young people coming from different European countries;
h) to raise knowledge of the participants about non-formal education, YouthPass, Erasmus + Programme, and its Key Action 1 and to encourage the participants to take an active part in the Programme;
i) to support creating networks and partnerships between participating organizations, exchange of good practices among participating countries related to fighting stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, social exclusion, and using Forum Theatre as a technique to tackle sensitive issues.
Activities
Youth exchange ‘Forum Theatre as Way of Building Socially Inclusive Communities’ will connect 48 young people representing several Programme countries. During the process of preparation, we agreed with our partners that we will especially involve newcomers. It means young people with no previous experiences in the field of Erasmus + Programme but strongly motivated to explore the topics of youth exchange, the ‘Forum Theatre’ and to share their new competencies with their peers.
Moreover, we agreed with our partners that youth exchange will include young people with fewer opportunities facing geographical and economic barriers.
Additional characteristics of the Participants:
-to fulfill the specific rules given by the Programme (age, residency);
-to have preferably previous experiences at the local level in the areas addressed by this project – tackling stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and social exclusion;
-to be strongly interested in exploring the tool ‘Forum Theatre’;
-to be motivated to work in intercultural settings, to work on the development of competencies, and to share experiences, and ideas;
-to be ready to fully participate in all project stages (preparation, implementation, follow-up);
-to contribute to the visibility of the project by sharing experiences, writing for social media and media, and taking part in visibility and dissemination activities organized by sending organizations.
Impact
Youth exchange ‘Forum Theatre as Way of Building Socially Inclusive Communities’ will have an impact on several levels:
-level of participants: In this case, the participants, young people, will increase their competencies in the areas addressed by the project such as fighting negative stereotypes, prejudices, discrimination, and social exclusion. Moreover, they will benefit from the possibility of experiencing ‘Forum Theatre’ and explore more about the Erasmus + Programme;
-level of participating organizations: they will increase their capacities to address social exclusion, discrimination by using the technique of ‘Forum Theatre’. They will benefit from new project ideas and especially, the project will be an opportunity for them to include newcomers and provide new opportunities for young people coming from their communities;
-Local level: The project will have an especially strong impact on local levels because it will include local ‘Forum Theatre’ events that the partners will organize in the follow-up period. Organizing these events will be a great opportunity to promote the Programme and to raise awareness of local communities on the issues of social exclusion, discrimination, addressing negative stereotypes, prejudices.
Youth exchange ‘Forum Theatre as Way of Building Socially Inclusive Communities’ will bring the following key result: interactive guideline on using ‘Forum Theatre’ as a tool for addressing social exclusion and discrimination.
