Between 25 September and 2 October 2021, we had a youth exchange in Mugla, Turkey with the participation of 42 young people from the Netherlands, Turkey, Spain, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania. In this page, you will see details and some results about the project.
Project Summary
Through this exchange between young people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds, we created awareness about prejudices and stereotypes. This way, we can fight hate speech, discrimination and social exclusion. That’s why we wanted to implement a human or living library where participants can learn the facts from the subjects of discrimination and exclusion. Fighting hate speech, discrimination and social exclusion are also one of the priorities of partners’ organizations of this project.
The idea for the youth exchange came up from young people involved in local activities of the partners. They expressed strong need and interest in a project that would allow them to learn more about hate speech, discrimination and social exclusion.
Discussions on the level of partner’s organizations involving young people, online discussions between the partners lead to the decision to realize a youth exchange giving young people an opportunity to strengthen their knowledge on social exclusion, discrimination and hate speech. Besides, the project provided young people with a chance to learn about the ‘living libraries’ methodology based on direct interaction between the visitors and ‘human books’ representing individuals who are being stereotyped, discriminated or socially excluded.
Project Results
During the project, the participants had the opportunity to learn these issues from a theoretical perspective and learn to express their personal experiences creatively through small workshops, plays, and group workouts among peers.
Youngsters from different sociocultural backgrounds worked together to increase their awareness towards discrimination, hate speech and social inclusion and to implement a living library simulation for the local community during the exchange. In the below manual, you can see how this is succeeded with the diligent work of the participants.
Below you can find a collage of videos made by the participants during the exchange. These videos summarize the learning outcomes of this project. With this video, we are also celebrating 10 December Human Rights Day.
Participants presented the videos above, poster presentation on the side and PowerPoint presentation below that they created as learning outcomes in the main Living Library event to the youngsters from the local community.
Dutch 
English