"Dragon dreaming for Golden road" is an educational project focused on young people from highschools in the region, but also on all generations of inhabitants from the local villages. Main topics is to create educational program support proactivity towards local issues. Participants will absolve several whole day excursions offering participatory project management methodology training and examples of good practices from local young entrepreneurs.

Prenčov village and surrounding large rural area Hont. Bansko Bystrický kraj, Slovakia.

One of the biggest problems is depopulation of the area. Young people are migrating to the cities, in search for better education and life opportunites. Local area lack jobs, and life standars are low. Population of these locations is usually passive, susceptible to support radical opinions and ideologies. We want to inspire local people and bring sense of proactivity built on examples of good practices and participatory methodologies supporting rise of new projects and exploration of new possibilities. We want to offer tools and guide first steps of new entrepreneurs, able to grab life into own hands.

Our target group are young people from local schools, and adults from nearby villages. All of them are inhabitants of villages or small towns in a region of Slovakia(Hont) which is a biggest rural area of the country. These people often feel insignificant and forgotten, they do not feel proud of their communities and do not care about them. Their attitude towards common issues, social, environmental and political is passivity. In last decade these conditions became fertile ground for extremist parties and ideologies, even among young people. Although we will focus on all generations, biggest part of participants will be highschool students (70%), since this target group is most accesible.

1. Preparation
Development of educational program- excursions (different for school students and local adults)
Preparing schedule for activities
2. Education
Multiple educational excursions and seminars, for local youth and adults.
Dragon dreaming trainings, examples of good practices, preparation of local actions
3. Activism
Local actions of participants based and inspired on previous learning with active support and facilitation
4. Evaluation and Dissemination
Evaluation meetings with participants
Transfer of experiences and used methodologies and tools
Sharing results

Participants will experience new tools and methodologies for local actions. They will see alternative way of life, which can be chance to avoid traditional paterns, often leading to migration, pasivity or extremism. Specific results will be prepared in local actions. Local people will be empowered by shared experience of activism. They will learn new values and perspectives, and will be able to appreciate their community. Thanks to this, they will be proud and have new sense of responsibility. Project will end by public presentations and exhibition.

Main methodology used for this project is Dargon dreaming - participatory and non-hierarchical methodology of project management. It is highly inclusive, involving all participating sites to decision making. Participants will be trained in this methodology, and inspired and guided to use it in their new small projects. By this project, particpants will gain experience how real democracy can work in small scale. Therefore it can be easier for them to understand how democracy work in large scale. At the same time project is motivating them to be active in their community (local projects) offering important experience of local activism.

Education is main field of our activism and contribution to society. We see that healthy society needs to be build of healthy local communities. Changing world is bringing challenges and communities need to be strong and resilient. However before talking about strong communities, we have to wake up local people from long sleep of pasivity, or to change focus of those active who search for enemies on wrong places supported by information war and hoaxes on social medias. Only if we are able to teach people to care about each other and their environment, discuss together and solve together local problems, be active and take responsibility for the place where we live, than we can talk about real community.

Preparation, promotion and marketing 3000E
Educational excursions and seminars 8000E
Travel (school buses) 2000E
Project management 3000E
Personel costs (trainers, facilitators, 12000E)
Support of local actions 8000E
Dissemination activities 3000E

We are happy to receive any kind of feedback. We slowly develop this project idea since long time, and we are happy to receive diferent perpective that can move it forward. We are also interested to see examples of similar projects.