The Foundation Catalunya Voluntària and the Peace Bag partnership have launched of this ´Peace Bag for EuroMed Youth’ publication.
The ‘Peace Bag for Euro-Med Youth’, reflects not only the Foundation’s goal to promote a real culture of peace, but also its aim to support cross country partnership. 18 different Euro-Med organisations across 14 countries partnered successfully to put this initiative together offering practical tools to raise awareness on the culture of peace, emphasizing the importance of mobility and participation of youth in developing initiatives through long-term partnership.
The Foundation is happy to know that some of its partners are planning for next phases of the project and others have agreed to start implementing the toolkit as a Peace Bag program in their own countries and organisations. Furthermore, partners are planning to create an informal network of the Peace Bag to be registered and recognised by the European Commission, enabling access to network funding, etc. in the near future.
Peace Bag for EuroMed Youth is a long-term project partnership of 18 organisations from 14 countries in the EuroMed region. It is coordinated by the Fundació Catalunya Voluntària, and co-financed by the 18 organisations of the partnership and the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures.
The Peace Bag project is a process of both theory and practice, divided into three phases. First was a training phase on peace and intercultural dialogue, and the first writing workshop where the main contents of this toolkit were born. The second phase was a 4-month local and international implementation of some of the contents of this toolkit, which also continued for another 4 months after the evaluation phase. Lastly, the third phase was the network meeting and evaluation of the project – where they also evaluated the developments of this toolkit. The result of these 3 phases is this publication – the Peace Bag for EuroMed Youth toolkit!
This toolkit is the product of our collective dialogue that created shared understandings of concepts such as peace, conflict, intercultural dialogue, nonviolence and diversity. This is the foundation for the co-operative work, which has created a strong partnership between 18 organisations involved in this project. With this toolkit, they hope to support and encourage long-term co-operation among young people working to further the culture of peace in the EuroMed.
The idea of this toolkit was born in 2009, after a ‘Peace Bag’ training course held in Ukraine, where the idea of coming up with a toolkit dedicated to help organisations “mainstream” peace education was developed. The goal was to create a manual on how youth organisations can conduct peace education activities and build a network of peace-builders who “walk their talk”.
You can download this publication for free here.
