To celebrate our 25th year acting and networking towards Social Inclusion of Young People, we wanted to put a spotlight on some of the ENTER Recommendation, a tool we often use to teach Young People about the Access of Social Rights.
ENTER recommendation #9:
Preventing discrimination
Discrimination is a barrier to active citizenship. Many young people with fewer opportunities experience discrimination because of social prejudice and isolation. As explained in the ENTER Recommendation, measures promoting cohesion and positive relations between people from different backgrounds can be implemented by organisations, municipalities, governments… In this article, we wanted to show you two examples of those successful measures, implemented by the Eurometropole of Strasbourg and our partner organisation Volunteers for All Association.
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Strasbourg Municipality, France
Each year, the City of Strasbourg and its partner organisations organise “The Weeks of Equality and Fight against Discrimination”, 3 weeks of events aimed at educating and raising awareness among children, young people and the general public on equality and discrimination.
These equality weeks offer to its visitors various workshops, games, and creative activities, developed to raise awareness and allow people to reflect and understand the other with their differences.
Whether related to sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, disability or religion, all discrimination is represented and deconstructed during this event!
We had the opportunity to visit this interactive exhibition with our participants in 2017, during our Structured Dialogue activity “Shaping Europe Together”. This year, the equality and anti-discrimination weeks will be held from September 24th to October 20th.
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Volunteers for All Association, Romania
At the beginning of September, Youth Express Network took part in the Youth Exchange “Don’t be afraid to show your true Colours”, organised by Volunteers for All Association in Milcoveni, Romania.
During 8 days, 40 young people coming from 7 different countries gathered to work together towards fighting against LGBTIQ+ discrimination and promoting LGBTIQ+ Rights. Thanks to a non-formal education based programme, they learned more about each other’s realities and the situation of the LGBTIQ+ community in several countries of Europe. Together, they thought about solutions and ways to fight against discrimination at local level.
As a result of this work, the group had the opportunity to actively raise awareness on LGBTIQ+ Rights in the city center of Resita, Romania. The young people got to make their voices heard through various artistic and informative means such as: a dance performance, impactful posters, a live and online survey and an info point.
This youth exchange was born from an idea developed during our Partnership Building Activity “Working Together in Europe“, in 2017. It was financially supported by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.