Norms and Values Within the European Reality

Norms and Values Within the European Reality is the second of the core strategic initiatives that the Foundation has been pursuing since 2018.

The projects that fall within this initiative are characterised by a focus on the ideologies and experiences that inform how the broadly diverse communities, institutions, organisations and individuals within Europe understand and relate to each other.

A strong focus is placed on projects that seek to support the democratic ideal and highlight the practical challenges and importance of contemporary democracy. The projects in this area may also seek to challenge existing norms that undermine or create a lack of security for specific communities, either by shining a spotlight on miscommunication and prejudice, or by creating new opportunities and initiatives for minority groups.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are another key thread within the Norms and Values Within the European Reality initiative, reflecting one of the Evens Foundation’s own core values.

(Re)thinking Values in Europe

One of the Evens Foundation key initiatives is to examine ethical issues, values and norms in Europe. As part of this, the Foundation formulated the ambition to bring together think tanks to discuss the key values that underlie the European reality: putting values at the core of discourse and challenging organisation to address and discuss the principles behind their work. There has long been debate about whether or not social sciences can ever be value-free, so it is also important to recognise and highlight that any discussion around values can never be held in dissociation of the participants’ own values, norms, and ideological foundations.

In 2021, the Evens Foundation and independent media organisation Are We Europe, designed and recorded a series of six podcasts called The Seventh Value. Its objective was to collect diverse opinions and visions about the six values that lie at the basis of our European societies whilst exploring what it means to be European today.

Each episode explores a different value, diving into contemporary stories about Europe like migration, Brexit and the impact of mining pollution on local communities, and bringing together a diverse range of think tanks and research centres for a unique, open discussion. At the end of each episode, the participants are invited to add their own new value: the ‘seventh value’.

The think tanks and research centres participating are: The Green Tank (Human Dignity), Institute for Social Movements (Freedom), Agora (Democracy), Digital Future Society (Equality), Europeum (Rule of Law) and Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Human Rights).

Projects: (Re)thinking Values in Europe (p.11), Journalistic Voices Diversified (p.12), Difference Day (p.12), Kleine Große Schritte (p.13), Resilience Reports (p.14), Building Trust in Journalism (p.15), (In)Separable (p.16), Over the Wall (p.17)

The series will air on major podcasting platforms in 2022, and will also be integrated into the Foundation’s 30th-anniversary event.

Journalistic Voices Diversified

Journalistic Voices Diversified is a new pilot programme, designed to support refugee and exiled journalists to resume, progress or re-address their careers in Europe.

Displaced journalists frequently enter Europe with a remarkable range of skills but they experience exclusion from employment circuits, cultural barriers and an overall impossibility to advance in their professional path.

Created in collaboration with Are We Europe and the Amsterdam-based narrative journalism foundation Stichting Verhalende Journalistiek, the programme aspires to create an environment that could offer participants the opportunity to pursue their career in Europe through a temporary traineeship placement, workshops and mentoring. A specific focus will be put on narrative practices and immersive storytelling.

The first call for participants was published at the very end of 2021, and participants will be selected for the programme early in 2022.

Difference Day

The Evens Foundation has a long-standing association with Difference Day, a unique event created to celebrate freedom of expression and highlight the work and importance of independent journalists and activists.

In 2021, the event – which usually takes place at venues across Brussels – was transformed into a digital experience due to the Covid-19 restrictions. On 2 and 3 May, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Erasmus University College Brussels, BOZAR and the Evens Foundation joined forces once again to raise awareness of press freedom and freedom of speech.

The seventh edition of Difference Day was dedicated to the theme of “Women Breaking the News”. On Sunday 2 May, two panel discussions with female journalists took place hosted by Annelies Beck (VRT) and Caroline Hick (RTBF): Women Journalists Behind the News and Women Journalists on the Front Line.

On Monday 3 May the Difference Day Honorary Title was awarded to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan, who covered the Corona outbreak in Wuhan. ULB and VUB awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa to Ms Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian. Waad Al-Kateab, director of the film For Sama, also received the Foundation P&V Citizenship Award. Vice-President of the European Commission Mrs Věra Jourová was a guest speaker.

In 2022, we plan to help Difference Day re-establish a physical presence.

Kleine Große Schritte

In 2020, the Evens Foundation initiated a new partnership with Ariel Trust (UK) and planpolitik (Germany) to facilitate the wider dissemination of an online interactive educational resource called Skills to Resist Radicalisation.

Skills to Resist Radicalisation was developed originally for the British context by Ariel Trust, one of the shortlisted candidates for the 2020 Evens Education Prize. The resource allows primary school teachers and their pupils to explore issues of extremism and radicalisation, and to build young people’s resilience to such messages.

From previous experience, we know that a thorough adaptation process is crucial to ensure that a tool or resource answers local needs, habits, sensitivities and tastes. The role of the Foundation was to facilitate this process.

Berlin-based planpolitik, an organisation that specialises in designing interactive educational formats on political and social topics and one of the candidates shortlisted for the 2017 Evens Peace Education Prize, accepted the demanding task of adapting the resource to fit the German context, where teachers are confronted with similar challenges.

Throughout 2021, several adaptation meetings took place, each time focusing on another module to explain and understand the changes proposed by planpolitik in both storyline and the exercise. This made the whole experience a rich learning process for all parties involved.

In October 2021, the first version of the German edition of the resource was presented to and tested by the German Respekt Coaches network.

The new German version of the resource is titled “Kleine Große Schritte: Umgang mit Ausgrenzung und Extremismus Erproben” (“Small Big Steps: Practicing to Deal with Exclusion and Extremism”) and is freely accessible for educators online.

Resilience Reports

As the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic began to become clear in 2020, the Evens Foundation partnered with the European Journalism Centre to launch Resilience Reports – a series of studies investigating how news organisations across Europe dealt with the impact of the health emergency – which continued into 2021.

Both media organisations and journalists were placed under extreme stress by this new and challenging reality. Independent organisations were forced to adapt their business strategies and operations, seeking to implement sustainable practices in a moment of extreme hardship when a drop in advertising and canonical revenue systems had greatly affected their activities. Meanwhile, journalists were tackling an onslaught of misinformation and a demand for reliable information under extraordinary circumstances.

The initial aim of the series was to capture and share some of these experiences. The initiative targeted 24 innovative newsrooms – across 19 different European countries – operating in various areas, including fact-checking, investigative and local journalism. The project was made possible with the collaboration of media professionals working at the organisations involved, ranging from editors, to membership managers, directors and audience engagement leads.

The final report, summarising the findings of the series, titled “The Resilience Report 2020: How Europe’s independent media dealt with the coronavirus pandemic in 2020”, was published online in 2021.

An interview with Tara Kelly, who led the project for the European Journalism Centre, authored 24 of the featured case studies and was co-author of the Resilience Reports summary report, was published online by Voxeurop and is available to read in English, French, Italian and Polish.

The material generated by the reports, including the learnings from the project (operational and editorial shifts due to the pandemic), were made available through Voxeurop to a group of 5,000 journalists through a dedicated newsletter.