Hate speech disarmament – Equipping youth workers to manage and transform hate speech Erasmus Project

Project Title

Hate speech disarmament – Equipping youth workers to manage and transform hate speech

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

We live in a world where sexist jokes among friends, xenophobic graffiti and racist speech among politicians has become an everyday experience. Too often, we do not even register it, as long as it does not target us directly. This is no different for youth workers lived reality. Hate Speech is an experienced reality across Europe and while efforts have been taken to address online hate speech and different actors programmes and training developed to combat youth radicalization, gaps remains in relation to how do youth workers actively address and transform hate speech in a safe and transformative way in different spaces for young people.

We all youth work practitioners are part of our families, circles of friends, communities, the political realm…; hence we need to unlearn the “normality” of hate speech and/or hateful behaviour ourselves first, in order to be able to recognise and tackle it with the young people and the youth groups we work with. This project gathered ideas, and created concreted new approaches and methods on how to support the youth worker in recognising and tackling situations where hate speech occurs within a youth setting and has the ambition to support the youth worker’s practice to become transformative.

We changed the name of the project when we started to implement the project as we found the original name not suitable for our target group and beneficiaries and not really inspiring people to get involved. We decided to call the project Outside In – Transforming Hate and created a visual identy to match the name. It resonated better the aim of the project.

The project lasted two years, from June 2017 to May 2019, and aimed at making youth work in Europe more inclusive and safer for all. Over the two years, five partner organisations from Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, and Slovenia, co-created a European network of trainers and experts who can provide quality trainings and tools for youth workers to recognise, manage, and transform hateful speech and behaviour in their everyday work with young people.

A unique aspect of this project was that this new network of trainers consists of youth workers and equality experts from the five countries who mainly belong to minority and marginalised groups themselves; groups which are often talked about but are still greatly under-represented in national and international youth work training structures and pool of experts.

These 24 youth workers and equality experts underwent an intensive training-of-trainers programme, which included three residential trainings (one in Slovenia, two in Portugal), transnational knowledge exchange, mentoring support scheme, and tasks to plan training outlines, test them out in practice and reflect their learninging order to develop their training skills (methodogogical skills and meta-skills that trainers need). As a result, they have gained knowledge, skills and experience of inclusive youth work and transformative manner to tackle hate speech in youth setting and have the competence to provide youth workers the tools, methods, and approaches to tackle hateful speech and behaviour constructively.

In addition, as an outcome of the training program and the new competence acquired by it, this same team of newly trained trainers have also co-created a practice manual for other youth workers as well as co-created a content for educational platform for youth workers. The practice manual and educational platform provide answer (hands on methods and knowledge) on some of the most perplexing needs of youth workers in today’s Europe – how to provide a safer space for all youths and how to tackle hateful speech and behaviour in a way that enable long-term change among youths with discriminatory attitudes and behaviour.

The project addressed the contemporary needs of youth workers in an innovative way, bringing together a diverse group of participants from five European countries all of whom have experienced or worked directly in confronting various hate speech issues within their national contexts. The slogan “Nothing About Us Without Us!” was a leading principle to communicate the idea that no policy and practise should be decided by any representative without the full and direct participation of members of the group’s affected by that policy and practice. In the core of all work in this project was to allow the often silenced and oppressed voices to be in core of all activities and development of content during the project.

In total more than 500 youth workers were trained during the project on national level coming from more than 100 different youth work organisation or institution. The educational on-line Platform and educational tools and Practise Manual have been very well recieved by the target group and is used by youth workers in all partner countries as well as reaching out youth workers outside the partnership.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 282583 Eur

Project Coordinator

RAUHANKASVATUSINSTITUUTTI RY INSTITUTET FOR FREDSFOSTRAN RF & Country: FI

Project Partners

• HA MOMENT CRL
• NATIONAL YOUTH COUNCIL OF IRELAND
• Interfaith Scotland
• Drustvo Parada ponosa