Thank you Demetris AmEx Demetriou for the report!
‘Active Citizenship in the Digital Era’ 15-21 July 2017, Wuppertal, Germany
This Erasmus+ Training course brought together 28 youth workers and active members of European youth organizations from Germany, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, FYROM Macedonia, Poland, Lithuania, Croatia, Estonia, Italy, Spain and Slovakia, for a full week in Wuppertal.
The project’s main objective was to find ways to overcome the widespread concern by EU about the declining engagement of civic life since citizens, and especially young people, are less inclined to vote, to join political parties, to campaign for social causes, and finally to trust political processes. Also we managed to answer questions, such as if the organizations of civil society motivate in a proper way the young people in order to transform them to active citizens, if they actually use the right tools which correspond to the real and realistic conditions of the ordinary democratic systems etc.
The project’s structured non-formal educational programme included forming an action plan whereby each of the organizations involved, will eventually be capable to activate all its members in the processes concerning democratic institutions in all possible means.
Project activities included team-building, simulations, debates, creating a blog for our daily reports, working groups, evaluation sessions and performances, that helped us to gain the necessary skills and competencies in order to address the democratic disconnect of young people, to identify those digital mediums that motivates young people to actively participate Online, to share effective Online tools that the participating organizations are currently being using with the intention to engage young people in democratic processes and to develop communication techniques interwoven with the social media society that inspires young people to be active citizens.