Arts for Change

Youth across the world, especially in the European Union, are encouraged and have the right to take part as active citizens in creating communities they belong to, locally and in society at large. However young people are often referred and seen as “citizens in the making”, “future leaders” and are never fully integrated and actively engaged in understanding, raising awareness or solving socially relevant issues of their own local communities.
Additionally, young people with fewer opportunities, specifically from migrant and refugee backgrounds and/or rural areas often experience further barriers that prevent their participation and contribution in raising awareness and understanding of local community issues.
Currently, mainstream rural academic educational institutions across Latvia and the rest of Europe lack understanding of locally socially relevant issues and are not encouraging youth to understand or contribute in solving or raising awareness of the issues faced by their own communities.
The “Youth Arts for Social Change” project aims at creating a youth-friendly environment for youth aged 13 - 16 to identify socially relevant issues and create art works contributing to raise awareness of the identified social issues faced by the community.
The partners of the “Youth Exchange” are rural educational institutions, youth clubs/centers from Latvia, Italy, Romania, Spain, Germany and Turkey which are working with marginalised youth aged 13-16 - from refugee/migrant backgrounds, minorities, socially excluded and from rural areas/small towns. Youth representing the partner org/inst will work to identify a socially relevant issues their community face in everyday life - discrimination, unemployment, lack of leisure activities, dirty neighbourhood, rise of fake news, etc. After identifying a socially relevant, youth-related issue of their own community, the youth are encouraged to create an OER presenting the identified issue: gathering views of peers, teachers, people from the community and document real life cases. After understanding and being aware of the identified issue, youth will create an artwork representing the identified issue - painting, poem, theatre play, song, posters, etc. The artworks are created with a condition that they are half done before the mobility activity (A6 - youth exchange).
Then, during the mobility activity “youth exchange” in Latvia, youth groups present the identified issue with each other and exchange the art works and in mixed groups work to finish the art-works e.g. if it is a poem - compose a music for it and create a song; for a painting - it is half done, during the mobility mixed group finish it, etc.
The main objectives of the project are to empower youth from marginalised backgrounds to be socially active and raise their understanding of the community they live in; to use art as a tool of social change to raise awareness and interest youth to identify socially relevant issues within their own communities; to promote active citizenship and European identity in exchanging different community youth-related realities of partner countries.