TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Dushko Radevski
training course “I Am Roma so what?“ was about how to use creative non-violent methods (song and video art) in combating discrimination and social exclusion of Roma youth, and promoting solidarity and equality of all people, regardless of their national, cultural, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender or other differences. The theme is to offer our participants an opportunity to get actively involved in fighting discrimination and social exclusion of Roma people, through creative methods, music workshops and activities.
The Objectives were:
-To promote anti-discrimination on every level, particularly on the basis of nationality and ethnic differences
-To promote tolerance, equality and solidarity among different cultures, nationalities, religious backgrounds
-To promote young people’s active participation in society and especially to empower Roma youth to take an active role in their communities in fighting homophobia and discrimination
-To increase knowledge of music and arts as a tool for fighting discrimination, homophobia, hate speech and violence
-To promote non-violence as the only acceptable method of communication and of resolving conflicts
At the and the main aim was to create a song.
Target group was mixture - half number of our participants were Roma nationality and half were not, but the most important was that all the people who were actively involved in working with Roma youth and their problems (youth workers, youth leaders, NGO activists).
We had 10 different countries who had participated with 3 participant per organization: Portugal, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Malta, Montenegro, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Macedonia and Serbia.
The implemented activities and applied methods: non-formal way of learning through creative writing activities and learning sessions. This includes: games, ice-breakers, team building exercises, individual and group activities, creating a music, work on practical examples in a small groups, workshops for creative writing/making music video and making documentary movie about all TC.
First we started with that team building activity in order to make cohesion between the participants, after that they were a presentation were all of the participants were presenting the Roma situation in their countries and we made a discussion about the situation. We used a World Café method in order to make better atmosphere for debate and discussion. The last two days we were more concentrate to make the song visible, we were writing singing recording….
They were a lot of positive outcomes, some visible some not visible but I think the most important outcome of our Training Course was the song that our participants made, they write a lyrics, music then played the instruments and sing it all together. Also we achieved an important intercultural moment when we had so many different nationalities and we can say that a lots of friendships are made along with breaking stereotypes and prejudices that some of our participant had before coming on this training course
I was a full member of the team of trainers. Also i was actively participated in the creation of the programme ,schedule, implementation of different workshops. I was working together with the trainer who was а professional musician and he was in charge of the music part of the training.