TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Aiste Slajute
The training seminar aimed to build participants’ competences to combat hate speech online and promote human rights on- and offline through human rights education and campaigning, with specific objectives:
● Strengthened their competences to address hate speech through human rights education, using Bookmarks and other tools;
● Developed their competence in working with human right education’s educational methodology;
● Shared and learnt from each other’s work, good practices and challenges;
● Developed competences to document and evaluate campaign initiatives and promote their visibility;
● Acquired knowledge of the approach of the Council of Europe to hate speech as a human rights issue;
This training seminar brought together 30 participants from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania who are doing or planning to do educational activities using Bookmarks manual to address issues related to hate speech. Group of participants represented a good mix between civil society activists working in the fields of youth and human rights protection, school teachers and educational advisers from the formal education sector and couple of governmental representatives
We divided training/ seminar objectives in three “lumps” : knowledge, practical skills, and follow up actions. Each day of the training was dedicated to particular issue as a response to the set objectives and participants’ needs.
On the first day, focus was on human rights education and Council of Europe’s work in this field, methods of work, existing tools, with special attention to the NHSM and the Bookmarks as a tool.
Second day was all about Bookmarks, where participants had an opportunity to go through the experiential learning phase and test some of the methods from the Bookmarks. During this day, practical know-how about methods, techniques and group dynamics were transferred during the feed-back moments.
Last day was dedicated to funding opportunities and action planning, with some concrete follow up steps.
In this regard, training covered all of the important aspects and answered to the objectives set for this event. With a support provided by the Council of Europe and Romanian Ministry for Youth and Sports, participants received lots of handouts and promotional materials for the campaign, including their own copy of the Bookmarks manual which will in a way ensure future multiplication of the knowledge and skills they gained during the seminar.
Participants gained more in-depth knowledge about the Council of Europe, in particular, the history and the background of the NHSM, European Youth Foundation and other tools that exist, e.g. Bookmarks, Compass, Compasito, T-Kits. It would be now up to the national governments and NHSM committees to make the multiplying effect more sustainable and to follow up on the participants’ steps and commitments. Many of the participants pledged to continue with this initiative, organising various smaller scale events.
I worked as a trainer on this course during preparation, implementation and evaluation phases.