MIJARC Europe

On 14th March 2020, our member organisation Umbrella from Georgia organised the second local visit planned among the activities of MIJARC Europe’s annual work plan “Rock, Paper, Participation“. The work plan focuses on seeing-judging-acting on how young people get involved in the dialogue on agricultural policies and on how they take part to sustainable agricultural practices.

The ”Rock, paper, participation” annual work plan is co-funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe and the European Union.

Umbrella gathered 13 of their young members and took them on a visit to Asureti Village and to Tetritskaro Youth Center. Firstly, they visited a farm and a greenhouses that belonged to the young farmer Gocha Apciauri, located in Asureti village. He presented his farm, the technologies he used and engaged he participants in an experiential learning activity inviting them to harvest vegetables. The discussion with the farmers focused on the challenges that he faced in his daily live as a farmer and the agricultural works.

The second half of the day was spent at Tetritskaro Youth Center, where the participants explored the “ladder of Participation”, the “triangle of cooperation”, worked in groups and used non-formal learning methods to identify challenges/barriers young people face if they want to get involved in the dialogue on agricultural policies.

They based their work on the study on youth involvement in agriculture – the case of Georgia – published by MIJARC Europe especially for this visit and the Revised European Charter on the Participation of Young People in Local and Regional Life (the Charter)

Youth involvement in agricultural policies – case study Georgia Download

According to participants their involvement in agricultural policy at local level is extremely low. They were not aware of the possibilities and mechanisms of participation in decision-making process at local level. None of them had ever taken part in discussions on farming issue or had been invited to the local Sakrebulo (local legislative body) meetings. In addition to this, despite the fact that representatives of two local municipalities (Tetrsitskaro and Marneuli) were invited to the meeting, none of them sent representatives.

The young participants decided that the priorities they should focus on at local level should be:

Information – access to information is the top priority as quite often the information is on websites but it is not proactively published or spread in the municipality. It also considers the accessibility to internet as it is not developed in rural area.
Motivation – low level of motivation or nihilism among youth and non-responsive local authorities. The priority is to raise the level of motivation among young people.
Language barrier – in the communities with ethnic minorities (Armenians, Azerbaijanis) in some cases they face language barriers as they lack of knowledge of state language. Translation of information into native languages.
Political will – promoting (advocating) political will among local authorities and awareness about the positive sides of involvement of young farmers in agricultural policy development process.

On 7th March 2020, our member organisation Federation of Youth Clubs of Armenia (FYCA), organised the first local visit planned within the activities of MIJARC Europe’s annual work plan “Rock, Paper, Participation“. The work plan focuses on seeing-judging-acting on how young people get involved in the dialogue on agricultural policies and on how they take part to sustainable agricultural practices.

The ”Rock, paper, participation” annual work plan is co-funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe and the European Union.

FYCA took the young participants to visit several agricultural farms in Nor Geghi (Kotayk province), Armenia.

The visits started with several meetings with local youth representatives and local & regional authorities. At first, the attendees discussed the current situation and existing challenges facing the youth in the region and explored the facts and issues raised by the study on youth involvement in agriculture done by MIJARC Europe.

Youth involvement in agricultural policies – case study ArmeniaDownload

Later, it was time to start the meetings with the farmers located in the region. The local visit to several agricultural farms in Armenia gathered 25 young volunteers and members from the organization, and also representatives from local and regional authorities from Kotayk province, Armenia.

Prior to the visit, the organization contacted the provincial administration representatives of Kotayk region through FYCA regional coordinator, Mari Hovakimyan. The visit was co-organized by the head of Nor Geghi community, Vardan Papyan and his administrative team.

The field visit started from “Green” intensive apple orchards, where farmers’ staff presented the basics of the fruit cultivation. The participants explored all the stages of producing apples: starting from the basic steps of orchard establishment and development to packing the ready-steady fruits for consumption. The apple orchards have been established in Nor Geghi community in 2016 and currently cover nearly 30 hectares, with the goal of expanding the area by 20 hectares in the nearest future. In addition to apple trees, pear, plum and cherry trees will also be planted there.

It is also interesting to know that the intensive orchards are harvested earlier than traditional orchards. In case of intensive orchards, up to ten times more seedlings are planted on 1 hectare of land. The farm grows a huge variety of apples and each of them is different in its own way.

Having explored the techniques and logistics of the production, it was time to carry out the second visit in the region. The next farm was a fishpond, belonging to “Ninel” LLC and providing employment opportunities to locals.

Afterwards, the team headed to the third well-known farm, “Lusakert” poultry factory. During the visit, the team got acquainted with the bird breeding conditions and technical equipment of the cultivation. As the factory staff informed, the chickens are kept in exclusively natural and ecological conditions, thus providing ecologically pure and nutritious products.

The information gained during the visits were later on used to discuss about how young people could get involved in agricultural policies and firstly if they should get involved. The participants explored the Revised European Charter on the Participation of Young People in Local and Regional Life (the Charter) and its six step implementation model. The participants came to the conclusion that agricultural development is crucially important for developing rural areas. Hence, the strategies and policies promoting the development of rural areas are considered to be a high priority in the country.

In order to reach sustainable agricultural development, it is necessary to provide rural youth with sufficient access to knowledge and information, through incorporating agricultural skills in the education.
According to the discussions, it became obvious that youth’s involvement in policy dialogue is still an existing challenge in the country. Thus, young people need to have access to integrated trainings in agricultural sector and get coherent response from policy-makers and development practitioners so as to overcome those challenges.

Overall, the following conclusion was drawn in result of the local visit: agricultural development is an extremely important asset for fostering sustainable development of rural communities’ livelihood and increasing the standards of living in those areas.

”Rock, paper, participation” – an annual work plan co-funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe and the European Union.

In 2020 MIJARC Europe will focus on seeing-judging-acting on how young people get involved in the dialogue on agricultural policies and on how they take part to sustainable agricultural practices.

Following the successful implementation of the work plan on citizenship and participation in 2019, MIJARC Europe has chosen to go deeper into the topic and build on the great results it has achieved so far, by focusing on increasing youth participation in building a sustainable future for agriculture and for rural communities. Agriculture is a key topic of MIJARC Europe and a strategic area of intervention when it comes to youth participation. Rural development and a prosperous, sustainable future for young people in rural areas are interlinked to agriculture. In 2017 official data revealed that Europe’s farming sector was dominated by an older population, especially in the case of women farmers – data showed that just 4.9% of farmers under 35 were women, compared to 6.4% for men. Even less were engaged in policy dialogue. We need to get young people from rural areas back at the dialogue table, we need to provide them with the skills and insight needed to understand what sustainable agriculture is and to give them a strong, informed and evidence-based voice in agricultural policies.

Listen to 32nd episode of our podcast “How about you(th)” to find out more about what sustainability means for agriculture.

Through this work plan we strive to provide the rural young people in the MIJARC Europe network with the values, attitudes, skills, knowledge and critical understanding required for meaningful participation and effective engagement in decision-making and policy development about sustainable agriculture.

We plan to achieve this aim by engaging the young people in a learning process which is based on the principles and instruments of the Revised European Charter on the Participation of Young People in Local and Regional Life and the methodology of youth participatory projects described in the ‘Have your say’ manual.

The three phases of the work plan bring young people closer to farmers, sustainable agriculture initiatives and agricultural policies and uses a bottom-up approach. During the local visits/national webinars young people focus on the priorities they feel should be pursued in their community in order to increase young people’s involvement in agriculture, while the seminar and the summer camp teach them to understand and work on agricultural policies and to develop concrete projects at community level to address the priorities identified.

The local visits are planned to take plan between March-May 2020 but following the mobility restrictions imposed by the current global pandemic, the local visits will be organised as webinars.

The seminar and the summer camp are postpone to autumn 2020 with updates to be published at the beginning of August 2020.

In Spring 2019, MIJARC Europe organized so-called “local visits” in 10 countries in which we have a member organization.

The objective of the activity was to discuss with young people, youth workers and local and regional authorities about youth participation, discover what they think about it and how they assess youth participation in their community.

MIJARC Europe is now publishing the report of these local visits.

No starting point to be youth

In most countries we visited, youth is defined by the age. In general there is no under limit: only three focus groups named the age at which you start to belong to “youth”. Nevertheless, there is a strong acceptation of the upper limit to youth, which is situated between 25 and 30 years old.

Youth organizations as spaces of real youth participation

The young people and youth workers assessed at a high level of participation the orginzations in which they are active. Most of them consider that their organization is a place where the decision process is shared between youth and adults, sometimes it is even completely youth led and initiated.

What happen if it does not happen?

The question “What happen if youth participation does not happen?” opened and gave participants the opportunity to reflect on the long term. The results were strong pessimistic. On one side, no youth participation would have bad influence on the society. If young people are not in a situation to participate and through this to become engaged and aware citizens, they would in the future no engaged adult and all our democratic system would be in danger. On the other side, the participants underlined the importance of youth participation for their personal development. They gave examples of skills they learned and ideas about what they want to do in the future they get through volunteering.

Check the complete report here.

The study session ”I, Youth Advocate” was a double study-session co-organised by the International Movement of Agricultural, Rural and Catholic Youth – Europe (MIJARC Europe) and Don Bosco Youth Net (DBYN). It was held between 7^th – 10^th October 2019 at the European Youth Centre in Budapest (EYCB).

The study session was based on non-formal education methods and used a mixture of the methodologies used by the two host-organisation. The “See-Judge-Act” methodology of MIJARC Europe and the Don Bosco method promoted by DBYN. As MIJARC Europe and DBYN are both faith-based organisation, sessions on spirituality were an important part of the programme.

The study session was structured on two main phases: an e-learning phase and the residential phase of the study session.

Online learning phase

The online learning phase took place between 20^th September – 2^nd October. It was hosted on the Moodle platform and it included ten days of study and a time investment of 2 hours per module.

More details about the online learning phase here: E-learning phase

Residential phase – General flow

The study session lasted only four days therefore the flow was designed around the principle of efficacy, aiming to create the appropriate atmosphere quickly and to build the spirit towards in-depth discussions and concrete actions on the topic of advocacy. 34 participants, 4 trainers and several experts from all over Europe came together to learn and teach about advocacy based on human rights and policies. The study session took place in the European Youth Centre of Budapest, which offered us both financial and content based support. Furthermore as the European Youth Centre stands for “Access to Rights” and “Youth Participation” their policy framework was an ideal basis for the learning programme.

Following the SEE-JUDGE-ACT methodology, the first day gave room for the SEE-phase, introducing participants to the rationale of the study session, the organisations involved and the objectives of the session and connecting the online learning phase with the residential one. Once the participants got into the “advocacy mood” and reached common ground on the key concepts of youth advocacy and youth advocates, a process of mapping local realities and transferring them to the European level was initiated.

The JUDGE-phase was built on two dimensions: (i) tools and instruments and (ii) advocacy skills. On the second day the participants learnt about the 9 steps of the advocacy circle and worked with it on different topics at local, national and European level. After that, there was an information session about the European Youth Forum (YFJ), given by Silja Markkula, board member of the YFJ. The participants learned about the human rights-based approach of the YFJ, about rights holders and duty bearers and also about the difference between policy and politics. A clear example that was given was about how the YFJ had a collective complaint/a legal case against Belgium on unpaid internships. This campaign was very successful and it resulted into a ban imposed by the European Parliament on having unpaid internships. The tool and instruments session block also included presentations of policy instruments used at European level by the Council of Europe, the European Union and policy instruments of the two organisations – MIJARC Europe and DBYN.

On the third day, the advocacy skills identified by the participants were pursued through a complex simulation game, set at the heart of the decision-making process of the European Union. It began with an explanation about the Council of the European Union and its president, the European Council and its president and The European Commission. This was needed to understand what the game was all about and to develop a strategy to play it. To play the game, all the participants were given a fictive role and were divided into four groups: the Commission, the European Parliament, the Council (of the European Union) and interest groups. While playing the simulation game, the participants learned a lot about the legislative procedures that are used in the given organisations and also about lobbying, setting up meetings, whom to address and also about listening to the opinions of interest groups and other parties.

During the ACT-phase the focus was on transferring the learning points to organisation level, by means of concrete actions in each of the two organisations: creating advocacy action plans for the three MIJARC Europe Commissions and training new commissioners, updating the Advocacy Handbook and the Policy Paper on Representation of DBYN and training new members of DBYN Pool of Representatives. The ACT phase included a common session on developing ideas for future collaboration between the two organisations and on including the learning results into the advocacy campaign MIJARC Europe and DBYN are running with COMECE. There was also an information session for all the participants about the European Youth Foundation (EYF), its available grants and how to apply for them.

MIJARC Europe and DBYN are both faith-based organisations, therefore spirituality was an important part in programme. Each day started and ended with a reflection session for “good morning” and “good night” in a special “silent room”. In addition to this, community groups were set up every evening to debrief on the main feelings and learning points of the day, to evaluate the gains, losses and changes participants wanted to see and to create a group feeling.

Main outputs:

Advocacy plans for MIJARC Europe Commissions

Simulation exercise “Caesar and Cleopatra”

E-learning session on advocacy – brief concept

Revised Handbook on Advocacy – published by DBYN

E-learning phase of the study session – “I, YOUTH ADVOCATE”

The first phase of our double study session “I, Youth Advocate” has just been launched. This is an e-learning phase, open to the participants on the Moodle platform.

The study session is organised by MIJARC EUROPE and DON BOSCO YOUTH NETWORK in cooperation with the Youth Department of the Council of Europe – European Youth Centre Budapest.

The e-learning phase covers two learning modules and aims to give a short introduction to the topic of advocacy.

The first module is designed to get participants familiar with the platform, get to know each other and the team of facilitators, learn about the Council of Europe, DBYN and MIJARC Europe and start making connections between their local realities, their roles within their organisations and the study session.

The second module gives a closer look into the TOPIC of advocacy and aims to set a really good and COMMON BASE for the study session itself.

The residential phase of the study session takes place between 7-10 October 2019 and it is hosted by the European Youth Center in Budapest.

The e-learning phase will be open initially only to registered participants but it will be made publicly available to all those interested in the topic.

Study session – “I, YOUTH ADVOCATE”

A study session organised by MIJARC EUROPE and DON BOSCO YOUTH NETWORK in cooperation with the Youth Department of the Council of Europe – European Youth Centre Budapest.

Dates: 7-10 October 2019

This study session has been a common idea of MIJARC Europe and Don Bosco Youth Network, two international organisations that work on very similar topics and who decided to do a joint study session on advocacy for their members.

Aim and objectives

The “I, Youth Advocate” study session aims to prepare young people from MIJARC Europe and DBYN Networks to be active advocates at European level, on diverse topics of interest for youth.

The main aim is built on the following objectives:

Assist young people to reflect on their local realities and link them to the policy changes they want at European level,
Explore advocacy tools and policy instruments of the Council of Europe, DBYN, MIJARC Europe and other European stakeholders in order to use them in their advocacy work,
Develop advocacy competences such as communication with relevant stakeholders, strategic planning and other skills to implement successful advocacy plans,
Empower young people to design concrete actions plans on advocacy to be implemented within the two organizations.

Hosting organizations

MIJARC Europe is a European coordination network for rural and Christian youth organizations all over the continent. MIJARC Europe represents over 130. 000 young people from rural areas in 14 European countries. It promotes sustainable agricultural, rural and international development, European citizenship, youth policies, gender equality, environmental protection, interculturality and human rights.

Don Bosco Youth-Net is an international network of Salesian youth work offices and youth organisations which work in the style of Don Bosco. The network assemblies 18 organisations, who cater for over 125.000 children and young people in 16 European countries. The task of the network is to create and promote international activities for and by young and to create possibilities for member organisations to share their good practices and start-up new projects together.

Study session design

The study session is based on non-formal education methods and will present a mixture of the methodologies used by the two host organizations. The “See-Judge-Act” methodology of MIJARC Europe and the Don Bosco method promoted by DBYN. You should expect a lot of experiential learning activities, reflection moments, practical examples and space for sharing and exchanging facts and opinions. As MIJARC Europe and DBYN are both faith-based organizations, we will also take time to reflect on our own values, beliefs and spirituality.

Phases

Thee will be two main phases of this study session:

E-learning phase (20th September – 2nd October) which will require 1-2 hours of involvement in total and will focus mostly on getting to know each other and setting a common ground to what we all understand by advocacy.
Study session (7-10 October) a four-day residential phase taking place in Budapest, at the European Youth Center. This is the main phase of the activity and participants will learn about advocacy practices and tools and will create action plans that the two host organizations will implement in their work.

Participants will also be invited to continue their involvement within the representation structures of the two host organizations and to further contribute to the implementation of the action plans.

Call for participants: study session “I , Youth advocate”

”Let our voice be heard” – an annual work plan co-funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe and the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Between 2018 and 2021 MIJARC Europe is leading its work around three thematic focus points described in the Specific Objectives adopted by the General Assembly back in 2017. The work plan we run in 2019 addressed MIJARC Europe’s commitment to support citizenship and youth participation in rural development.

Through the work plan we run in 2019 we aimed to help rural young people in MIJARC Europe network and beyond feel that they have the right, the means and the skills to drive change at local level and to motive other stakeholders to support their ideas and create opportunities for youth participation together.

We wanted young people to feel that they know, they can, and they want to be involved, to be able to imagine the concrete, sequential steps towards achieving real impact and to identify how to determine local authorities to join their initiatives in order to see those changes they envision, happen in reality.

This aim was pursued through the following specific objectives:

O1: enable young people from rural areas to discriminate between self-imposed barriers to participation (their own perceptions, stereotypes and attitudes) and real barriers and find inspiration to identify solutions to both types of barriers;

O2: teach young people how to communicate with, involve and ask for support from local authorities and perceive them as partners rather than opponents;

O3: empower young people from rural areas to become competent and effective digital citizens;

O4: contribute to the implementation of the principles of the Revised Charter on participation of young people in local and regional life and to the dissemination of the “Have your say manual” to local public authorities and youth NGOs in at least 10 rural areas in Europe.

PHASES

The work plan included one local activity and two international activities, reinforced by follow- up activities at local level.

From February to April 2019, MIJARC Europe organized focus groups, called “local visits” in 9 different countries in Europe. Small groups of 10 to 20 people aged from 12 to 22 years old came together, sometimes also with representatives of local authorities, to discuss the topic of youth participation.

Questions like “what does youth participation mean?”, “what kind of youth participation does take place?”, “does real participation take place?”, “how young people are involved, do they have a real chance to participate and co-decide?” have been deeply discussed with the help of the manual “Have your Say”. The manual Have your Say is a tool of the Council of Europe for young people and local authorities to implement and use the Charter on youth participation in the local and regional life. The findings of the local visits were included in a report and illustrated in country fact sheets. The results of this small scale research were at the basis of the next two phases.

Report on the state of youth participation – local visits

Info graphics – country fact sheets

The second activity was an international seminar, which gathered 40 young people, for four full working days. It had the role to bridge the results of the fieldwork done by MIJARC Europe during the local visits with the theoretical and practical aspects of the participation at local, national, regional and European lever by involving active members in a proactive learning process.

The seminar was designed and led based on the methods of non-formal education and relevant approaches using the Revised European Charter on the Participation of Young People in local and regional life and the “Have your say” Manual. The successful implementation of the seminar resulted in a magazine of personal stories of participation written and drawn by the participants, the creation of vlogs and of three infographics. The final evaluation results show that the seminar scored high in the hearts and minds of the participants. The percentage of those who believe that they got the basic theory, practical approaches and tools, to help them to build a culture of participation after the seminar is about 92%.

Digital magazine “My story of participation”

Vlogs – https://www.youtube.com/user/MIJARCEurope/videos

Info-graphics

Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe

The seminar was complemented by the third phase, an international training course on e- citizenship that offered additional tools and ideas to tackle the problems identified in the first phase. The training course aimed to bring the participants closer to e-participation. The participants were encouraged to build their own positions for different topics related to participation and e-participation and they had a possibility to present and discuss in a safe learning environment.

They had a possibility to address their comments and questions to Dirk Van Eeckhout, the Thematic Coordinator on Information Policy in the Council of Europe and Rita Jonusaite, part of the secretariat of the YFJ. That was a highly valuable experience that helped the participants to meet stakeholders, gain self-confidence and resilience breaking the present barriers. The participants worked together in intercultural subgroups in order to solve practical case studies through the e-participation tools they have discovered.

The most impressive result of the training course was the set up of an online campaign “Every Breath we take” the participants used to raise awareness on the fires in the Amazon and climate injustice. The campaign worked as a Facebook challenge in which young people were challenged to take a photo of themselves with their eyes closed, taking a deep breath along with the written message: “Our common home is on fire. The Amazon is burning. We cannot hold our breath until you finally take action. We need to act NOW!”. It also included four calls to action and messages inspired by the position papers of MIJARC Europe such as: “We demand national governments to take concrete actions to meet their commitments to the Paris agreement”. The campaign gathered more than 100 people who took a photo of themselves, posted the photo along with the message on their Facebook profile and challenged their friends

Every breath we take campaign

Training booklet on e-participation

Finally, each organization involved did a follow-up activity of their choice, involving a minimum number of 10 participants. The full list of follow-up activities can be seen here.

Follow-up activity in Bulgaria

Follow-up activity in Germany

Follow-up activity in Romania

The results of the work plan were also presented and promoted in our biannual magazine: MIJARC Explore.

Between 4th – 8th September 2018, our member movement APSD-Agenda 21 is hosting a youth exchange on peace and conflict. The project is called “Messages from the future” and it is part of our annual work plan on 2018 “We are the others”. The youth exchange is co-financed by the ERASMUS+ Programme of the European Union. It is organized as an international simulation on four different topics which affect peace and conflict at global level: climate change, migration, gender inequality and extremism.

The final day of our youth exchange brought to our attention the topic of extremism with the help of a very interesting game and many balloons. The team of facilitators adapted ”The Island” simulation from the All Different, All Equal Education Pack in order to show that differences should be first acknowledged and then accepted, that tolerance and adaptability are key skills and that diversity should be celebrated.

Split into two different tribes, both worshiping balloons the participants took their roles seriously and started looking for a very rare type of balloon which could only be found with a special map. Of course each tribe possessed only half of the map and only by coming together and mending the two halves could the tribes find the balloons. The negotiations were tough and the members of the tribes had to learn the other’s culture in order to be able to communicate with them.

In the debriefing part they talked about how important it had been to stay open and to adapt to the situation by learning the language of the other tribe, sharing their habits and not using violent methods. They discussed about culture, what makes it important and about what brings the cultures into conflict. They reflected on who gains and who loses from a conflict and about the negative and positive consequences of opening up towards other cultures.

Next, the tribes prepared the photo-messages with their most important conclusion.

The day ended with a long evaluation and follow-up session, in which the participants reflected on their learning, filled-in their youth passes and discovered what competences they had developed throughout the week. They also made plans for hosting the travelling exhibition and found out who their secret friend had been.

Gender inequalities were at the core of the fourth day which brought participants face to face with some of the realities of the labour market and of domestic violence. After an energetic start of the morning, the participants watched a short movie about gender and split in four groups deciding on weather some adjectives described male or female features or positive and negative features. The activity was adapted from the “Gender Matters” manual and it introduced the participants into gender stereotyping.

Next, it was time for them to work and get paid. They were assigned a role with information about their sex, age and experience and they had to go through five work stations where they performed different tasks (arranging small balls on piles of the same colour, preparing bread dough or scoring with a basket ball). At the end of the game they made a long row and received their payment which, of course, took into account their performance but also their sex and their age. In the debriefing part, they discussed about the inequalities on the labour market between genders and how unjust the system is with huge pay gaps in some countries.

The next game brought them face to face with real cases of domestic violence of all types which they discussed in national groups and then presented their conclusion to the rest of the participants. The fact that they were split on national groups really helped with showing the different approaches the countries represented have towards gender violence, the laws that apply and the feeling of the community towards the victims and the perpetrators.

The day ended with the creation of the photo-messages which were very creative and provoking.