Back2Values

From 2008 the word crisis has become sadly on fashion due to the big financial situation in Europe.

Nevertheless, there is a much bigger and deeper crisis not possible to measure with numbers and financial reports. And not so many people are talking about it. This is the alarming crisis of human values that is hitting our society.

The Economy for the Common Good (ECG) is an innovative economy arising in Europe since 2010 which does not focus in financial capital but persons. This means not measuring life by a Gross Domestic Product (GRP) but by the quality of life of people. We believe that this would be a great way to start changing the capitalist vision of our society. For this reason, the values that we want to recover have been divided into the five categories (used by ECG to measure the level of common good of enterprises):

- Human dignity (Human rights, gender equality…)
- Solidarity and cooperation (Sharing, community tasks…)
- Social justice (Welfare state, public services…)
- Sustainable development (Ecological footprint, planned obsolescence…)
- Participatory democracy and transparency

Under this context, “Back2Values” aims to be a space where participants will be able to get and to create awareness about the lack of human values nowadays in our society, and to generate tools and activities in order to build these values back.

The study visit will take place in Valencia (Spain) with 25 youth workers coming from Portugal, Greece, Italy, Ireland and Spain.

While applying for this study visit, participants will have to choose between one of the categories. Each category will have one participant from each country. Like this, all the categories will be analysed according to each country’s reality. Once they will be selected, they will be asked to do a research about their chosen category and how it is being applied in their countries of origin.

In this way, all the participants will arrive to the study visit highly motivated and with information about the current situation in their own countries, which will be exposed, analysed and used by each group in order to create statistics, case studies, debates, and to find alternatives and other solutions to improve the current reality of their countries.

In addition, there will be an expert from the “Economy for the Common Good”, so participants will learn about what it is, how and where it is being applied nowadays, and how can individuals or enterprises join this movement.