Ukraine

Follow-up of Youth Exchange in Armenia “Your time – your possbilities”

(Ukraine, Donetsk Youth Debate Centre)

Information about Exchange on web-pages:

https://cent.dn.ua/your-time-yours-possibilities/?lang=en#more-929

https://yia.org.ua/2010/11/18/molodzhnijj_obmn_Your_time__yours_possibilities.html

Activities:

After we came back to home we met together to discuss what can be done in Donetsk to activate young people and to help them to use their free time more efficiently.

So, what we decided to to:

-          Every week to organize a Club for youngsters to discuss youth related issues and to share news, opinions, ideas, so on. To promote these idea we decided to use youth informational tool – social network “vkontakte” which is used by most of young people in Donetsk. By this web-page we made annonce for next meeting. It looked like this:

-          We developed the schedule and decided to dedicate every month to one of important topics. For November we choosed topic: “stereotypes” and made following meetings:

And here’s plan for November:

Some pictures from meetings:

 Role Play “Albatros”

 Group discussions in Debate Centre

 Teambuilding))

Every time about 10-20 young people attend the meetings, among them some comes regularly and some occasionally – when they don’t know what to do during their free time))

As result of group discussions we had during the meetings with youth idea to make some event to attract attention of wider group of young people has appeared. We decided to use our free time, our efforts, knowledge, skills and inspiration to break stereotypes. And we remembered about idea which was presented by our friends from Poland and Czech Republic during the Exchage – idea about of Living Library project.

So, idea of the project:

The idea

Living library is a project that offers a fun approach to serious issues: increasing social cohesion, breaking down barriers between people belonging to different groups in society and potentially preventing issues of intolerance or conflict. The problem of social cohesion and human rights issues are, thus, addressed by encouraging free dialogue and interaction between people in order to break the stereotypes created by misconceptions and misinformation.

The idea behind this project is that encouraging people to talk with each others will reduce mistrust and establish a closer relationship between different members of the community. The difference between this event and looking something up on the internet is that here it’s more communicative. You ask questions and see people’s faces. It’s like reading a biography, but more interactive because you can talk to the person and ask them questions. Maybe the experience challenges your own ideas about how people live, and how what you see on television or read in the papers is different to people’s lives.

To make this idea to come true we created working group of LLP and shared responsibilities between us – promotion tasks, contacts with people, design of materials, etc.

We have prepared and printed posters and leaflets and then spread them at the Universities, schools and other public places of Donetsk.

You can find more information about event itself as well as some pictures on :

https://cent.dn.ua/proekt-zhyva-biblioteka/?lang=en#more-1586

https://vkontakte.ru/club21408907

https://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_165782016795685

Report about event is in attachment.

And…. The main success is that we will have follow-up of follow-up!!!!))) – after success of our small event we have applied for financial support to Donetsk city hall with idea to organize similar event on bigger scale and the project was approved. In May 2011 we will organize Living Library 2! And at the moment we have no free time as we are busy working on the new project))