TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Photini - Claire Karamouzis
aims at building capacities and trust among different youth communities – bringing them closer at both local and international level – to co-create together a more inclusive and open-minded Europe.
The project tackles the issues of hate speech and lack of participation of youth communities experiencing discrimination and exclusion. Through a process of capacity building, local and international activities, our youth workers and youth organisations will develop competencies for reaching out to disadvantaged youngsters and communities. The project will empower these young people to become community leaders, to identify and deconstruct hateful narratives, and build more inclusive narratives for their communities.
The project gathers 11 partners from 10 countries around Europe with expertise in working with diverse groups of youngsters from disadvantaged and marginalised areas and providing space for their participation.
The original proposed idea was that the YE will gather 50 people from the 10 partner countries (5 participants per country). However, due to the consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic we had to adapt the exchange itself to the current situation. Using innovative online facilitation methods, the trainers, in collaboration with the organizer and with the support of the YEU Secretariat and PET Coordinators developed an exchange program focused on sharing the experiences of the participants. The aim of the YE was to provide space for each of the local teams developed in previous activities to get together, share their identified hateful narratives, and work together on building each other’s competencies on how to tackle them, and share practices on how to create alternative narratives.
Creating a secure online space that would allow as many participants as possible to actively participate was also a priority. This was done in several ways: first, we avoided using typical digital tools such as Zoom. For this reason, special attention was given to Gamification and to interactive tools such as Gather.town, Kahoot and other various types of visual presentations. At the very beginning of the exchange, we gave the opportunity to our participants to get acquainted with tools such as Gather.town. More specifically, Gather.Town is an interactive tool, in which participants have their own player, and can walk and interact with other participants and surrounding objects. During the sessions, the participants were asked to walk around the platform and interact with others in order to fulfill the tasks they were asked (e.g. find someone who is a student and ask him/her about their greatest student night). By creating custom maps and games, participants had the opportunity to get to know each other better which amongst other things also helped in reducing any potential fear of the online environment.
Local Project Coordinator & Facilitator