We Can! – Participants Blog
Training for usage of “We Can” manual was organized in Nis, Serbia from 11th till 18th of August. This training course is part of project “Hate fighters network work plan 2019” which is implemented by Hate Fighters network and supported by European Youth Foundation.
The First day started with an introduction of the project given by the facilitators. After that, we moved on to getting to know each other. And what’s the best way to do that other than playing the Name games and some team building games.
Before focusing on the manual we were learning, discussing and sharing about different expectations and demands that society puts on young women and men. We were participating in different workshops which help us understand obstacles and challenges that young people are facing in everyday life. From discussions to the role playing every part was emotional and overwhelming and it helped us understand impact that stereotypes and prejudices have on society. After those sessions were done we were educated and ready to go deeper in these subjects.
We talked about the definition of hate speech and the articles in the European convention of human rights devoted to freedom of speech and hate speech. Then we analyzed various examples of hate speech: sexism, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, antigypsysm, racism. During these activities we started with planning different campaigns and tools that we can use in combat against hate speech. Accent was put on creating counter and alternative narrative instead of oppressive ones. This was very useful and interesting method to learn because it provided us interesting ways to combat against hate speech. Because of the fact that after this training we will have follow-up activities in form of local trainings in our own countries we had couple of workshops which helped us understand more the role of trainers and facilitators.
Another big subject besides combating hate speech was interculturalism, we had amazing time discovering different cultures and traditions, we shared a lot of interesting facts about our nations and most importantly we build some beautiful friendships.
In the end we would like to say thank you to everyone who participated, to our trainers, our hosts, we enjoyed every part of this week. We had amazing time and we learned so much in the most inspiring environment.
