Rejection Stories Erasmus Project

Project Title

Rejection Stories

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 : Partnerships for Creativity

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)

Project Summary

Recently the internet and consumer culture have promoted unachievable standards for work, leisure, and personal life. As a result, we often feel inadequate, rejected, anxieted, inappropriate, or different from what is expected in public. In 2020 March Canadian researcher Karen Horsman has published an article which says that all people experience one or another form of rejection in their lives. The article mentions that young people will experience rejection in their personal relationships (divorce, betrayal), career path (did not succeed to enter to the desired club or school, college and university) or even due to certain individual characteristics – nationality, race, disability or sexual orientation.

Often young people experience stress due to the difficulty of adapting to society because they have been rejected or underestimated. And this determines their individual level of independence, self-esteem and emotional intelligence. Not all young people find it easy to overcome life’s challenges, some need help understanding the processes and feelings they go through, how they go through them, and at the same time realizing that similar feelings are experienced by their peers, friends and even adults who also have been rejected by other. It is a well-developed level of emotional intelligence and the ability to recognize one’s feelings that makes it easier for individuals to survive the difficult and critical stages of life. Emotional intelligence is not a new thing. It used to be called human maturity, wisdom, or mental health. Emotional intelligence is a person’s personal and interpersonal competencies, which help to ensure a person’s emotional and spiritual resilience and allow to experience various feelings: joy, frustration, pain, sadness, loss, etc. In order to raise a person with high emotional intelligence, we need to cultivate four basic aspects of well-being: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. For a long time, the school focused only on the development of mental and physical abilities, a little less on the spiritual, and almost no attention was paid to emotional intelligence.

Realizing that with the pandemic there is a need for more digital youth work with young people, we will run a social communication campaign for young people on a social network where they spend the most time and create the illusion of their real life. During the project, we will create an Instagram account, in which young people will be interacted on the topics of rejection, disapproval, denial and underestimation, which merge into one topic “rejected”. In order to make this innovative tool effective, attractive, engaging and interesting for young people, together with our partners, the depersonalized stories of rejection will be used in the video clips, for which we will use young Lithuanian, Italian and Estonian artists. A total of 30 clips will be created that will convey different stories of rejection in a variety of artistic and creative expressions, thus showing young people that rejection is part of our lives, that rejection in some situations leads to others that are not necessarily negative. Finally, to encourage young people to get involved and share their rejection stories in artistic expression, we will invite 90 young people (30 from each project partner country) to create their rejection story on the trash-bin. From the collected works of art, 3 exhibitions (one in each project partner country) with rejection stories will be created, thus showing that rejection, denial, disapproval and underestimation are not moments of life that need to be “thrown in the trash”, it is part of us and we have to live together with it and which we can turn into an opportunity – in this case – an art exhibition.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 94990 Eur

Project Coordinator

Society and Enterprise Development Institute & Country: LT

Project Partners

• Fattore K
• VSI “Kulturines ir organizacines idejos”
• MITTETULUNDUSUHING INVOLVED