With the project Let’s Stand Up for Tolerance, we encouraged young people to tolerate other ethnic groups, ethnic minorities, migrants, people of different sexual orientation, race and gender. Through the project, we spread awareness that in spite of diversity, all human beings have equal human rights. Through our activities we learned the importance of hate speech, its effects and appearance in the media and in the local environment. As the largest channel through which the hate speech spreads, we also touched the media and the web, and learned how to critically evaluate media content with the help of guests who came from the field of media. Throughout the project, we implemented a campaign that we designed during the project itself in creative workshops. We also invited local organizations to participate in our campaign in Murska Sobota. Youth exchange took place between 28th of September and 06th of October 2018, joining 33 young people from Slovenia, Poland, Romania, Portugal and Greece. The project included young people with fewer opportunities from different backgrounds. The young people developed personal competences and improved the competences of public speaking, developed foreign language skills, enhanced intercultural cooperation and defended their opinions.
The main objectives of the project were: to promote tolerance towards migrants, ethnic groups, other nationalities, gender, sexual orientation, race and other groups among the project participants. Through the project, these objectives were achieved, as the participants met and got to know all the groups mentioned above. Through the activities, we carried out a workshop on migrants and refugees and learned about the situation of migrants and refugees in our countries and in Europe in general. We found that the participants had very different opinions and this opened up many debates. During the activity, we were visited by a member of the Roma community who shared his story about his childhood and how he told his family and the Roma community that he was homosexual. Later, he also welcomed us in the Roma settlement Pušča near Murska Sobota, where we organised a tour and a workshop for Roma youth on tolerance and equality. At the end of the visit, we also held a dance workshop where all participants had the opportunity to learn about Roma music and dance. During the activities we also held a workshop where we learnt about the LGBT community and what it is like in our countries. Through the workshops, the participants reduced our prejudices and broke down stereotypes through different games we played in the park and in our classroom. In the park, we learnt about the game “Step forward” and in the role play we learnt about different life situations. In the stereotyping game, we created stories about different people based on a photo. We also learnt about hate speech and how to recognize it, we looked online at different examples of hate speech and presented what hate speech is in our countries and how we deal with it. We were visited by the Pomurec.com web portal, where we learnt how to read media texts and how to identify hate speech in the media (especially online). Throughout the project we encouraged tolerant intercultural dialogue between all participating countries, European nations, different ethnic groups, different groups of people and tolerance towards each other. Through interactive and creative workshops, we encouraged each other to be creative and to use and learn to use multimedia content (especially photo and video). Many photographs were taken, which will always remind us of our time spent together in Slovenia.
