In Europe youth workers need methods, tools, procedures and guidelines to deal with hate speech and to manage and solve conflicts in sustainable way in their work. In particular they are looking concrete tools for working with youth that use hateful language in youth spaces and concrete methods for hate speech transformation with youngsters with extremist attitudes. The objective of this project is to collect existing best practices and develop concrete means and tools to tackle hate speech in youth work. The project will increase awareness, information and know-how about hate speech and related phenomena. The project will develop and share concrete means and measures to tackle hate speech in youth work, and build the capacity of youth workers to implement anti hate speech actions in their work. Through the transformative approach to tackling hate speech, the project promotes constructive participation in the society. This means that engagement with (rather than exclusion of) young people producing hate speech helps to avoid their becoming radicalized or joining extremist groups or gangs. If all relevant youth work organisations in our countries embark on the journey of hate speech transformation then these young people will benefit immensely as they will get the structured space where their manner of expression will be challenged, they will be challenged to reflect their positions, but at the same time they will not be excluded from youth work activities and they will get the chance to develop themselves into reflected and respectful human beings, even accepting diversity and ambiguity. That will also have positive impact for society as less youth with extremist opinions and behaviour means heathier and safer society for all. The innovation of this project lies in the diversity of the partnership and the specific expertise each partner brings to the table through their participants. During the project we will train 25 youth workers, who identify themselves as belonging to marginalised or minority group, to become specialised trainers in hate speech transformation - expertise really lacking in the national contexts of the participating organisations based on experience and needs analysis. Today in most of the partner countries youth workers belonging to marginalised and minority groups are not participating in any of the main established pools of trainers and their opinions and expertise is not heard when looking for solutions for the worsening hate speech phenomenon in our societies. With the expertise from the field and the one of partner organisations we will create an interactive Tool Kit for Hate Speech Transformation to be used by youth workers, trainers and educators working with groups of young people. The Tool Kit is a collection of methodologies to be used in any group when hate speech occurs or when participants use discriminatory speech in their interactions with others and within the group. We will also create an Interactive Online Learning Platform which will serve as a complementary mechanism for the Tool Kit and will be an independent learning space and tool on the other hand. The partners of the project comes from Finland, Portugal, Ireland, Slovenia and Scotland; each bringing different working knowledge and experiences which include youth policy, LQBTQ, Religious interfaith, disability, peace education, professional training of youth workers, anti racism and discrimination. All partners work directly with youth and minority or marginalised groups. Having such diverse partners enables an innovative approach to addressing hate speech, from reaching the profiled participants from minority groups to, understanding the issue of hate speech and the tools/methods for transforming hate speech and discrimination in a safe and educational way. The project partnerships brings with it a unique approach to equality and social inclusion, through supporting the exchange and new learning of each other's knowledge and sector experiences. Through this process the project will gather best practices to address and transform hate speech in youth spaces, providing tools for youth workers and the youth field beyond the project.
We live in a world where sexist jokes among friends, xenophobic graffiti and racist speech among politicians has become an everyday experience. Too often, we do not even register it, as long as it does not target us directly. This is no different for youth workers lived reality. Hate Speech is an experienced reality across Europe and while efforts have been taken to address online hate speech and different actors programmes and training developed to combat youth radicalization, gaps remains in relation to how do youth workers actively address and transform hate speech in a safe and transformative way in different spaces for young people. We all youth work practitioners are part of our families, circles of friends, communities, the political realm…; hence we need to unlearn the “normality” of hate speech and/or hateful behaviour ourselves first, in order to be able to recognise and tackle it with the young people and the youth groups we work with. This project gathered ideas, and created concreted new approaches and methods on how to support the youth worker in recognising and tackling situations where hate speech occurs within a youth setting and has the ambition to support the youth worker’s practice to become transformative. We changed the name of the project when we started to implement the project as we found the original name not suitable for our target group and beneficiaries and not really inspiring people to get involved. We decided to call the project Outside In – Transforming Hate and created a visual identy to match the name. It resonated better the aim of the project. The project lasted two years, from June 2017 to May 2019, and aimed at making youth work in Europe more inclusive and safer for all. Over the two years, five partner organisations from Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, and Slovenia, co-created a European network of trainers and experts who can provide quality trainings and tools for youth workers to recognise, manage, and transform hateful speech and behaviour in their everyday work with young people. A unique aspect of this project was that this new network of trainers consists of youth workers and equality experts from the five countries who mainly belong to minority and marginalised groups themselves; groups which are often talked about but are still greatly under-represented in national and international youth work training structures and pool of experts. These 24 youth workers and equality experts underwent an intensive training-of-trainers programme, which included three residential trainings (one in Slovenia, two in Portugal), transnational knowledge exchange, mentoring support scheme, and tasks to plan training outlines, test them out in practice and reflect their learninging order to develop their training skills (methodogogical skills and meta-skills that trainers need). As a result, they have gained knowledge, skills and experience of inclusive youth work and transformative manner to tackle hate speech in youth setting and have the competence to provide youth workers the tools, methods, and approaches to tackle hateful speech and behaviour constructively. In addition, as an outcome of the training program and the new competence acquired by it, this same team of newly trained trainers have also co-created a practice manual for other youth workers as well as co-created a content for educational platform for youth workers. The practice manual and educational platform provide answer (hands on methods and knowledge) on some of the most perplexing needs of youth workers in today’s Europe – how to provide a safer space for all youths and how to tackle hateful speech and behaviour in a way that enable long-term change among youths with discriminatory attitudes and behaviour. The project addressed the contemporary needs of youth workers in an innovative way, bringing together a diverse group of participants from five European countries all of whom have experienced or worked directly in confronting various hate speech issues within their national contexts. The slogan “Nothing About Us Without Us!” was a leading principle to communicate the idea that no policy and practise should be decided by any representative without the full and direct participation of members of the group’s affected by that policy and practice. In the core of all work in this project was to allow the often silenced and oppressed voices to be in core of all activities and development of content during the project. In total more than 500 youth workers were trained during the project on national level coming from more than 100 different youth work organisation or institution. The educational on-line Platform and educational tools and Practise Manual have been very well recieved by the target group and is used by youth workers in all partner countries as well as reaching out youth workers outside the partnership.