The You Monitor project brings together anti-corruption and youth organisations to support community-based anti-corruption action. Coherently with the provisions of UNCAC and the EU Youth Strategy 2019-2027, the project supports quality youth work on civic anti-corruption and community-based monitoring, that includes the cross-disciplinary facets of: - civic engagement; - culture of integrity; - social cohesion and justice; - Right to Know; - Freedom of Information; - care of the Common Good; - participation to democratic life. The project recognises monitorial communities as the best bottom-up anti-corruption contributions and supports capacity building of youth workers, who are often keen on addressing these issues, but lack of expertise on such complex topics and are left with little to no material specifically designed for their audience. SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE AND METHOD You Monitor will develop an innovative, cross-sectorial and non-formal educational method (the You Monitor toolkit), produced together by CSOs partners and usable by youth workers. This will help engage and empower young people in civic anti-corruption (promoting a culture of integrity and developing monitorial communities). The You Monitor toolkit will: - create 3 simplified guides and 3 educational tools; - be open-licensed, in 4 languages, replicable and re-usable, modifiable according to needs; - adopt 5 different methods: informative, theatrical/experiential and ethical dilemma approaches; role-playing; campaigning techniques. You Monitor will outperform frontal lessons on corruption, which often focus only on regulatory aspects, are not accessible to youth and have poor impact. RESULTS AND ACTIVITIES The 3 expected results are: R1 – Increased capability of youth workers to explain to, empower and engage youth in handling the entrusted power, positively managing conflict of interests and using their Right to Know. Coherently, the activities will be: - Kick-off staff meeting: Leipzig, Feb ‘21; - 3 intellectual outputs (IOs): "How to monitor yourself against corruption" - guide; "How to recognize your entrusted power & manage your conflict of interests" - tool; "How to use your right to know" – guide; - a training session “You Monitor yourself against corruption”, Turin, Oct ‘21, to finalise and test with a first group of YWs the IOs produced. R2 – Acquired capability to support and empower youth engaging in community-based monitoring activities/initiatives. Coherently, the activities will be: - Stop-over staff meeting: Marseille, Nov ‘21; - 3 IOs: "How to monitor the common good" - guide; "How to spread the culture of integrity & create a community-based monitoring campaign" - tool; "How to manage a monitorial community" - educational game; - a training session “You Monitor the common good”, Berlin, July ‘22, to finalise and test, with a first group of YWs, the produced IOs. R3 – Increased dissemination of civic key competences for community-based monitoring and active citizenship against corruption in EU and, specifically, in partners' countries. The R3 work package includes: - Touch down staff meeting, Turin, Sept ’22; - an external communication strategy throughout the project; - 3 multiplier events; - follow-up actions. PARTICIPANTS You Monitor involves 2 key types of participants: 1. Partners' staff Six organisations from France, Germany, Italy (mafianeindanke e.V.; Eine Welt e.V.; Gruppo Abele; Libera; DeMains Libres; Échanges et Partenariat) will create together the You Monitor toolkit, under the supervision of the University of Pisa. For each partner will participate: - 1 project manager; - 1 expert in anti-corruption or related fields or a youth worker, involved in IOs production. 2. Youth Workers (main beneficiaries) - 12 YWs belonging to the partners involved in the two Training Sessions, to assess the relevance and replicability of the You Monitor toolkit; - up to 300 YWs involved in the 3 multiplier events. With You Monitor, youth workers will be provided with an innovative non-formal educational toolkit specifically targeted for their audience and will test how to use it with young people during two dedicated training sessions. They will be encouraged to lead international exchanges between YWs and young monitorial citizens, and develop other educational tools inspired by the You Monitor toolkit. Partner CSOs will have new tools for awareness-raising, training and empowerment of youth on civic anti-corruption that can be directly used at local, national and EU level. They will expand a network of stakeholders interested in employing the project outcomes, both local youth workers and public authorities. Finally, in the medium-long term, thanks to training based on You Monitor IOs, youth as our final beneficiaries will be offered opportunities and tools necessary to become young anti-corruption activists and leaders, promoting the culture of integrity and anti-corruption campaigns at local/national/EU level.
The specific objective of You Monitor was to develop an innovative, cross-sectorial and non-formal educational method (the You Monitor toolkit), produced together by partners and usable by youth workers to engage and empower young people in civic anti-corruption (promoting a culture of integrity and developing monitorial communities). By this objective, the project wanted to meet the Erasmus+ goals to support capacity building of youth workers and foster quality improvements in youth work, developing innovative non-formal educational methods and bringing together organisations in the youth and anti-corruption fields. Consistently with the EU Youth Strategy 2019-2027, the project fostered citizenship competencies and created opportunities for young people to participate in public life in policy areas affecting their lives, with an innovative form of democratic participation aimed to tackle corruption with a bottom-up approach. The project responded also to the provisions of UNCAC for CSOs to promote anti-corruption education programmes and public participation in decision-making processes.
The motivation behind the project started from the recognition of missing coordinated efforts to promote anti-corruption in education programmes targeting youth, and poor cooperation between European CSOs in engaging youth in anti-corruption projects, making anti-corruption unattractive. The project partners felt the urgency to promote integrity and anti-corruption as founding values of the EU among young people and observed the need of bringing together thematic (anti-corruption) and methodological (youth work) expertise to produce an effective method. The goal was to outdo the traditional approach focused on the repressive aspects of the phenomenon, and instead being designed for a specific young audience, adaptable to different country contexts and aimed at engaging and empowering young people on these issues with a non-formal approach - restoring a sense of trust in society and the state. In addition, there was the will to introduce to a young audience and develop a new approach towards the topic of monitoring democracies and monitoring communities, seen as a community tool to protect the common good. All these observations together led the partnership towards the You Monitor project.