Breaking Binaries

The goal is to collect, learn and improve workshops on the themes and with the lived experience of youth workers and youth, whit the power of culture and exchange. We have partners from The Netherlands, Croatia and Poland and are currently looking for 2 more partner organisations.

Context
There is a lot of information on Gender online to find, but when trainers want to start by questioning their normatives and make their training more gender inclusive there is no website where trainers could go to start an inclusive training. Breaking Binary platform will be the new European platform to go to and discover the world beyond the binary normative. With the information gathered, tested and created from different European prospectives. With an Open forum to place your questions and space to talk with your peers.

Project Breaking Binary is a participatory project for youth work organisations, that creates a world beyond the binary normative. It started as a conversation between me and other friends, about the lack of centralized knowledge and language for Non-binary people. In the Netherlands, there was a working group of cis-gender people that we were creating new words to include us. This process has stopped. Every day we are confronted with a heteronormative society that is built in a binary way. Due to colonial times, these heteronormative and binary ideas are also spread around the world. To decolonize our language and heteronormativity we started to make the project international. During the Queerasmus exchange in Dublin in May 2022 (organised by the National Agency of Ireland), I met potential parties from Slovakia, Poland, Croatia and Sweden. During last week Cross Over Prague program we also created the outline of our program.

In the first year of our partnership, we want to create local training meetings, with young non-binary individuals and possible youth organisations working on breaking binary systems. What are the systems beyond the binary that is already there, witch knowledge is in this group? With this training, we will get on some kind of the same level in thinking. After this create a training program for youth workers in the second year. In the third year, we will close this part of the program with a youth exchange, to bring local contexts together and exchange their views and questions. With the workshops, we created in the second year of the program. Every three months there is a feedback/reflection moment planned to make sure the project is in line whit the outcomes and the needs of young people. During the three years, we will also share our outcomes on the breaking binary platform and during different presentation events. From the different mappings and workshops, we will collect the learnings and also share this. The workshops will be available for other youth workers as well to incorporate into their work. On the forum of the website, they can also share their outcomes and learnings to keep an open dialogue about the new world beyond the binary normative.