Youth workers 4 Human Rights

The pandemic had come and left everybody unprepared. It showed even more clearly also the existing issues related to social injustice, social exclusion and discrimination. The pandemic also revealed the weaknesses of each industry as well as youth work itself-the lack of digital competences of youth workers in general, low level of digital literacy in the sector, difficulties to transform normal daily youth work activities into digital format and provide same quality services and activities for youth. All partners within the consortium were facing difficulties to maintain the same connection with our local community youth left youth alone in those difficult times. Thus young people who were already vulnerable and in danger of falling into social exclusion and especially minority youth were left out with any support system and help from NGOs while the online environment was becoming the battle field for raising hate speech, hatred, hostility and anger towards minority groups especially. The pandemic had brought back some existing stigmas but also flamed new challenges for minorities to face thus youth workers need to get equipped with the right knowledge, understanding, awareness, skills and competence set to understand the situations of minority youth, challenges related to human rights violations of specific minority groups , develop understanding of minority rights and minority rights issues on European level, get to know tools, methods, best practices to support, engage, mentor and do advocacy work for minority youth. After a thorough internal evaluation questionnaire filled by youth workers and staff members within our partner consortium we have identified the missing pieces of the puzzle in terms of understanding, knowledge, skills and competence set of the youth workers thus we needed to address them to increase the capacity of our NGOs to address the current challenges of minority youth we all work with and deliver more quality minority rights campaigns and actions.

The focus of the project will be investing in the capacity of youth workers and respectively their organizations to tackle minority youth issues on local and European level. The project also focuses on directly increasing the quality of activities and services provided by the partner consortium for minority youth groups they work with on local level by actively involving youth workers/ coordinators/ staff members directly working on minority issues at the sending organizations.

The aims of the project proposal are related to :

• providing deeper understanding of minority, minority groups, minority rights and challenges
• raising awareness on current issues, effect of COVID19 and all other factors related to minority youth /specific foe each minority group related to all aspects of life/
• develop skills, competences and knowledge on ways of promoting, protecting and educating about minority rights
• providing understanding and getting experience in advocacy for minority rights