Empowering EU-gration

30 July 2017

As a reaction to the current situation in Europe ( immigrants coming from outside of Europe, people developing racists attitudes towards immigrants from far East as well as from inside of EU) we created the project titled „Empowerment – EU –gration”. The idea for the project was born as a natural reaction to the need of understanding the migration problem and addressing its challenges, which emerged during another youth exchange that we organized – “Soft skills – connecting people!” That is why the same partner organizations were taking part in this project, namely Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania. Each group consisted of 8 people (7youth+leader). The exchange took place between 23-29 july 2017 in Poronin and was preceded by “preparation visit” 2 weeks before. The main aims of the projects were: getting to know the migration situation of our countries, building the attitude of international and interreligious tolerance at the local, regional, national and international level, especially in the environments culturally closed, empowering integration of societies welcoming emigrants and immigrants coming to culturally-diversified societies, creating tools to help immigrants to integrate, building a positive image of migration as a process that speeds up self-development and influences building a diversified society, promoting diversity and at the same time preventing radicalism of young people toward migration. Through varied methods of work such as tang part in different kinds of discussions, public speaking, presentations, auto presentations, brainstorming, role plays, national evenings, bonfire, drawing works, graphs the participants acquired practical skills. These will let the participants of the exchange take part actively in social and civic life, present their opinions in a content-related and creative way, taking part in an international dialogue, develop critical thinking with regards to all major events in Europe, empower them to taking social initiatives. The days have finished with sum-ups, which was evaluation making sure that the quality of the project is kept on the high level and also helped gathering information for Youthpass certificate. We believe that the high quality of the project and its promotion in social media, Internet and local media will guarantee further effects such as participants engagement in helping immigrants as well as further engagement in Erasmus + and inviting to take part in it other young people.