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Youth Work in Debate
Support youth opinions and raise your voice for young people
By Filippo Massariol and Michael Magee
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Youth Work in Debate is a two year long-term international Strategic Partnership funded by the Erasmus+ Programme. The idea is to help young people participate more actively in a social and political sense and improve their critical thinking skills through debate methodology. The project will involve 60 youth workers & youngsters aged 18-21 years, respectively, from June 2019 to May 2021.
The Partners of the project are Bluebook, a communication agency from Italy and United Societies of Balkans and Youth Empowerment Association from North Macedonia. The program is divided into 3 phases. Currently, the project is in the second one. Phase one consists of training activities to motivate and prepare the participants for the subsequent activities. The next phase involves three different workshops in each country, conducted by youth workers who have completed the first phase, and monitored by people from the projects team. In the 3rd and last phase, debate activities in
Greece are conducted with the youth workers and the young people they work with.
© Olga Katsilidou
First transnational meeting
“ Youth Worker In Debate” officially started with the first transnational meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece, from 16-17 of July 2019. The meeting was hosted by USB – United Society of Balkans. Two members of each organization attended the kick-off meeting. They discussed the preparation of the subsequent activities, the general lines of action, and the dates of the first youth exchange to be held later on in Turin, Italy.
An alternative phase one
On June 15th in Italy, Bluebook started working with the young participants on debate methodologies through Google Meet and Google Classroom. Due to the Covid emergency, the first workshop has been split into a series of virtual meetings. The participants had the opportunity to take part in a lecture about organizing and facilitating digital workshops about debate methodology. Luckily, in October, it was finally possible to conduct the project in Turin. This part is a preparatory phase for the upcoming workshops that will include 16 young participants from the local community in every participant country. The activities aim to improve the skills of youth workers by exchanging good practices in youth sectors from the participating countries. Yannis Tsotsos, the project manager for USB, is satisfied and enjoys participating in the project although the programme cannot advance as intended, due to the pandemic. “ So in KA2, we have several activities in the partner countries of the project. In Youth worker in Debate, there was a mobility activity in Italy, where the participants created some tools on how to have a fruitful debate and how to support their own opinions. After that, the partner organisations had to do some local activities in order to share the results of the training course in Italy. One of the activities was in the part of the project implemented in October, in which we shared those tools amongst our participants from the local community. We have two other activities to implement in order to share everything that was made up from this mobility activity in Italy.” During these youth mobility sessions, participants are taught ways to better voice their opinion and support their arguments. Also, speech itself is improved, in that they are taught to speak more clearly and to raise their voice when speaking. According to Yannis, the project is quite fulfilling as he can see that the participants are motivated and are learning from the project results.
sources: https://youthindebate.eu/
