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Promuoviamo unA Nuova GEnerazione di pAce

2024-1-IT03-KA154-YOU-0002347372024Youth participation activitiesfinalized
Countries: IT · Grant: €59,965
Human rights and rule of lawPrevention of conflicts, post-conflict rehabilitationInternational relations and development cooperation

Objectives

The PANGEA project was born from the concern for the continuous growth of internal and international conflict and from the will to promote a new culture of positive peace. Through some stages in person and online, we have formed a group of young people who, starting from the United Nations document entitled Pact for the Future signed in New York on September 22-23, 2024, developed some significant activities for the promotion of the culture of peace. In the 19 months of predicted duration, the project created a group of 75 young people and educators who had a series of occasions to meet, train, and discuss the five “chapters” of the Pact for the Future: sustainable development, peace, technology and digitalization, youth, and global governance. The PerugiAssisi Foundation for the Culture of Peace, which for many years has worked on these global problems with young people, wanted in this way to facilitate the diffusion of the UN document and the awareness of the challenges that await us, arousing among young people a strong interest, involvement, and participation. To discuss the Pact, to deepen it, and learn to question it, specific materials were produced. The partners provided knowledge tools related to the understanding of the system of global governance, human rights, and the United Nations (University Centre for Human Rights of the University of Padua) and policymakers, mayors, assessors, and councillors to create moments of confrontation and discussion with the young participants on contemporary global challenges and problems (National Coordination of Local Authorities for Peace and Human Rights). Starting from the 1980s, in the face of the nuclear arms race and the danger of the outbreak of an atomic war in Europe, the commitment of young people for peace spread considerably, generating a wide pacifist movement committed to peace, disarmament, and nonviolence. In the years in which the return of war in Europe, the continuation and multiplication of conflicts in the world, the increase in political opposition, the growth of economic inequalities and social malaise, the continuous increase in climate disasters together with the growing detachment of the younger generations from politics, from decision-making power, from civic participation and therefore from democracy, make an extraordinary effort necessary and urgent to train a new generation of young people with a culture of positive peace and a developed capacity for care of the community, humanity, and the planet. Young people between 18 and 30 years old, with the will to activate themselves and become a megaphone of peace, human rights, and care for others and with the desire to be participants in European social and political life, were the target of this project. We involved them through the vast network of organizations (over 3,000 groups, associations, and local entities) connected to the PerugiAssisi Foundation and to the two project partners. The young participants took part in a path of civic education to positive peace, made of study, research, and deepening first and of activities and activism later. The project was based on Positive Youth Development (PYD), a pedagogical approach that recognizes young students as bearers of resources to be developed, which engages their talents, their energy, and their abilities in constructive programs within the school, the community, the peer groups; which promotes their development by providing continuous opportunities to participate in the life of the community, cultivating positive relationships between young people and adults and developing their skills. With this project, the PerugiAssisi Foundation believes to have given a new impulse to permanent education for peace and care (an essential and often neglected component of peace education) to grow a new generation of young builders, architects, and artisans of peace. The general objective of the project was to develop in young people between 18 and 30 years old the critical sense and active participation in the process of building a society no longer based on the paradigm of war but on the paradigm of care for others, from the neighborhood to the UN. The selected young people were protagonists of all phases of the project, with the support and accompaniment of qualified experts, with whom, after having deepened the knowledge of the problems faced by the United Nations Summit of the Future, they were able to interact in dialectical and engaging moments.

Project partners (3)