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Draw To Change Reality - Chapter II "TEEN VERSION"

2019-3-IE01-KA105-0656222019Youth mobilityfinalized
Countries: IE|LV|GE · Grant: €27,881
Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)Creativity and cultureInclusion - equity

Objectives

The idea to have daylight the second part of the Youth Exchange "Draw To Change Reality" which was successfully carried out 01/10 - 11/10/2018 was born during the project as one of the outcomes of it whilst Irish and Georgian participants working on the E+ project ideas development. They expressed a will to work on and proposed that it would be a great chance if "Draw to change reality" would have another life but in this case project would be for only teenager participants. Teenagers because the issues and problems highlighted into the project are the most actual in their age group than in any other. So we shared our work to them and Irish and Georgian participants' project team together Latvian organization continued working on "Draw To Change Reality - Chapter II "TEEN VERSION". Youth, this is the part of the society which creates its future. At the same time, youth are particularly vulnerable to economic shocks, social instability, and conflicts. As an age cohort, youth are less likely to be involved in decision-making processes even sometimes into the ones which are exactly connected to their personal life choices. Youth are also likely to face marginalization due to belonging to excluded demographic groups: including women, disabled, refugee, ethnic minority, migrant, and economically impoverished. Additionally, young people are often further marginalized within these groups due to their age. This layered marginalization not only infringes upon the human rights of young people but also has negative effects on the cohesion and stability of the societies in which we live. When we speak about all of these youth problems, we can call youth a vast variety of age groups. However, the most vulnerable group out of these is teenagers, youth at adolescent age who mostly find difficulties coping with new problems or obstacles. In this age it is very important to make youth feel that they are independent persons, they have their voice, can make the decisions and have full rights to be involved in their society's life. Nowadays, all of these facts: positively and rapidly developing society, paying attention more on human and equal rights for society's every member, rising the voice against bullying and oppressing make teenagers think more seriously about the youth problems. We see that they have been searching for ways how to express themselves and their opinions. Not rarely this absolute positive desire can be easily transformed into a negative fact and self-expression ways may become, on the contrary, itself negative and discriminating. This happens when youth are not able and have not a chance to be heard his voice or just being rejected by peers or adults. As a result of having a lot live examples of this around us, also youth marginalization and their exclusion cases from decision-making processes and realizing lack of positive self-expressing ways of youth, we decided to set an aim to speak out against this problem through this project and use the Comics as an effective, creative, original and inspiring tool for encouragement of youth to be active citizens of our society. There are several meaningful reasons why we made up our mind to use Comics. Firstly, working on creating comics: script, storyboard and using art develops the creativity in youth, secondly, they really reflect us and the problems for most of the today’s times and beyond, it’s a reflection of the good and the bad of our society, and thirdly, the teenagers' huge interest of comics which is caused by a broad range of genres: adventure, comedy, historical drama, mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, sport, games, etc. All of the above-mentioned make Comics the place where everyone wants to travel despite the age, gender or different preferences, what for its part will give the participants an opportunity to spread wider what they want to say whilst creatively and enjoyably will work on the creation of comics with their peers. The main objectives of the project were: - To highlight and tackle a youth marginalization problem - To equip teenagers with skills of creating and drawing comics to reach their voice to the public - To encourage youth to be active citizens - To inspire youngsters to have their voice, defend their opinions and take part in decision-making processes - To dispose of unwanted stereotypes - To get intercultural experience by meeting with peers -To motivate teenagers to be more actively involved in E+ programme

Project partners (3)