How to Survive the Multicultural Society?

Extremist movements, ideas, parties and organizations present one of the biggest challenges to European democracies. They start to get large support and engage more and more young people. Considering the very recent extremist movements in Europe, terrorist attacks, raising xenophobia and Islamophobia APY -Armenian Progressive Youth (Armenia) and Jongeren voor Uitwisseling en Begrip (The Netherlands) have gathered active young people, youth workers and activists to discuss the questions of multicultural society, inter-religious and intercultural tolerance and tom find some practical tools to fight discrimination and combat extremism.

The Training Course took place in Yerevan, Armenia from 19-27 September and brought together 30 youth workers, young leaders from Armenia, Georgia, Italy, Latvia, Moldova, Poland, Russian Federation, Sweden, The Netherlands, Turkey and Ukraine. The main aim of the Training Course was to find ways to combat xenophobia and discrimination, by sharing experiences and to provide youth workers with skills to develop good quality projects that would focus on the topic of multicultural society. 

During the Training Course APY will looked deeper into the problems of discrimination, extremism, nationalism, intolerance and intercultural misunderstandings and discussed how active youth workers can spread the idea of living together, accepting differences and fighting together against prejudice and xenophobia. Through the methods of non-formal education APY aimed at empowering youth workers and youth leaders with skills, knowledge and attitudes to play an active role towards a multicultural society.

Why does APY discriminate? How it is possible that almost everyone agrees that discrimination isn’t good and that we should stop it, but it still exist? And what are the possible solutions to stop people decimating each other? These were some of the questions discussed. Apart from looking to discrimination in general, we also addressed the specific discrimination problems in the different countries where the participants come from. Which groups are mostly discriminated in participant countries? Why? Are there any ideas how to stop that? What can we learn from the problems and solutions from other countries? And more importantly: how we can bring these solutions into practice when we have returned back home?

Check out the movie and learn about the results of the project!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5S7C2sCENo

 

Armenian Progressive Youth

 

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