We are very pleased to have launched the first stage of our advocacy campaign against nationalism and marginalisation of the ''other''. The campaign utilises  material and messages created by youth through our Policy Labs and our Peer-To-Peer Mentorship programs and is aimed at reconstructring a shared civic and democratic space not just in Lesvos bur also across pockets of Europe which are facing the same challenges. The campaign has been launched through our social media and we would like to ask for your kind support in helping us promote it. Feel free to share and like our posts, if you feel these are relevant to your organisations! Keep us posted with any comments and suggestions on how we can improve our actions to reach audiences in your country and region. Do our messages also resonate with your community? 

https://www.facebook.com/latralab

https://www.instagram.com/latra_innovlab/?hl=en

We share with the community, some pictures of the zines produced by the youth during the policy labs as well as the group process followed. The zines produced by the youth are going to be the foundation of an advocacy campaign which will be launched in June 2021 and will be shared through our social media. Watch this space as more news will soon follow :) 

For the past weeks our educators and facilitators have been assessing the results from our weekly policy labs. Policy labs are bi-weekly workshops where diverse youth work together towards  co-creating policy recommendations for an inclusive Europe and co-design a public advocacy campaign aimed at curbing nationalism and extremism, not just in Lesvos but across pockets of Europe that face similar challenges. So far more than 100 youth have participated in the policy labs despite the many adversities caused by COVID-19. The main tool that we used in the policy labs, was the creation of zines, a DIY personalised magazine produced by youth which summarises their ideas based on prompts the educators and faciliators provided (see project journey April 10th). The prompts provided centred around European values (democracy, freedom, etc) and how the youth they feel apply to their everyday life in relation to instances of xenophobia and racism they have experienced. The visually stunning zines produced by the youth, not only carry elements of their homelands, journies and experiences, but also paint pictures of struggle, survival and solidarity. The youth which are predominantly unaccompanied refugee minors, have faced unimaginable challenges and dangers all across their journies from their homelands to Greece. But upon arrival in Europe they have also experienced instances of xenophobia, racism, verbal and physical violence which has affected the ways they view Europe as a safe haven for them. At the same time the youth feel a tremendous sense of luck that they made the journey succesfully, even as they face an overwhelming sense of rejection from local society. Despite their great efforts towards integrating (attending school, learning the local language, etc) they are very often gaslighted from peers, teachers, protection officers and asylum procedures. Almost all youth state that they experience racism at an almost daily basis, yet they perceive that as something of their established reality, as these are the circumstances that they had to deal with throughout their journey. Despite the adversities however, the vast majority of youth also feel a sense of streangth and empowerment, as they have managed to succesfully complete a very difficult part of their journey, and they have managed to attend school, acquire new skills and make new friends. For the youth, the highest priority in policy asks to be inclusion and equity. The belief is that through such policies, the public will become more accepting of the other and of diversity. Positive human to human interactions and building up a human network of solidarity are the driving forces that will help guide our community towards a more equitable future. 

One of our greatest motivations when applying to the Civic Europe program, was its focus to empower organisations operating in civic deserts across Europe. As both Iliaktida (https://iliaktida-amea.gr) and Latra (http://latra.gr) are operating in Lesvos, an island that despite the severe challenges affecting citizens does not benefit from an organised and unified civil society space, we are proactively seeking to connect with CSOs and NGOs participating in the CE program which operate towards reconstructing a shared European democratic space. Our intent is to exchange knowledge and practices that can be utilised in similar settings across pockets of Europe, to systemically reconstruct a resilient civic fabric capable of curbing extremist ideology targeting the ‘other’ and the core values of our European community. From our end, we are able to provide collaborators with tools and methodologies that we are using and have proved effective towards that end, and are looking to discuss how strategies by organisations can be utilised across different settings and regions. Eventually, and as part of the CE program, we will also be able to provide organisations with a public advocacy campaign which they can utilise to campaign locally, enabling in that way the creation of a united advocacy front of CSOs across Europe which tackle similar challenges. Please get in touch if you are interested in connecting :)

For the past 3 months, we have been conducting bi-weekly workshops empowering diverse youth  to address European values (democracy, freedom, equality, etc) and to discuss how these apply to their everyday life in Lesvos. The workshops are meant to serve as a first step and a prepatory action in the public advocacy campaign that will be co-created by youth, and is the focal output of the Peacebuilders project. However, our past experience and engagement with diverse, vulnerable and often marginalised youth, had taught us, that more often than not, youth struggled both to comprehend the scope of European values, and critically translate them into creative outputs that could be utilised in the context of public discourse, public communication or advocacy campaigns.

In order to overcome this challenge we utilised a ‘zine’ methodology. A zine -which stands short for magazine- is a DIY/self-made mini magazine produced by one or more individuals, and often in a single or limited amount of copies. Prior to the start of our Peacebuilders project, we had developed and tested the zine methodology in the context of an EU-funded project (https://system2020.education) with very encouraging results, and the outcomes encouraged us to use zines in the context of this project in order to test their efficacy in empowering learners to comprehend and communicate challenging topics.

Each zine is produced by an individual learner, and it takes approximately 6 sessions to complete, with each session lasting 1-1,5 hours. Although the zines are produced on an individual basis, the workshop is conducted in a group, encouraging conversation and dialogue between the learners. Each zine is made out of half an A4 coloured carton, which has been folded like a book, in order to produce 4 internal pages, one cover page and one back cover. In each session, the learner concentrates in an individual page. At the beginning of each session the educator/facilitator provides learners with a different prompt, and the learners have to reflect on that prompt through their creation of the zine. In order to make zines more attractive and relatable to learners, facilitators presented the zines to learners as ‘passports’ into their future. Examples of different prompts that we provided to learners include: (i) send a message to your future self (ii) send a message to your country (iii) send a message to Greece (iv) send a message to Europe, etc. After the zines are completed by learners, a session is dedicated in open discussion where the learners present their zine to the group of their peers and engage in meaningful dialogue alongside the facilitator.

The zines produced by the learners are in the cross-over between a mini-magazine, a private journal and an artistic artefact, all of which help in providing the groundwork for the public advocacy campaign which will be produced in a later stage of the project.

We found that zines can be powerful evaluative tools which tell learner-led stories of their experiences and nurture deep reflection and personalisation of a learning experiences across disciplines. Critically the zines empower position learners not as consumers of knowledge, but as critics, creators, and crucially, experts in their own communities of knowledge, who through questions and provocations can go from  relating to reflecting on how new information might be relevant to their communities. Finally as the centre of the process is dialogue, safeguarding and open presentation, the zine can serve not just as a reflective exercise but also an additive evaluation tool both at the hands of educators, facilitators and cultural mediators.