Objectives

Nowadays a lot of young people try to connect to each other, build regional partnerships and international cooperation. However, these activities sometimes have certain limitations as those ones who share more similarities tend to cooperate more while excluding different groups. Intercultural dialogue and cultural understanding are still missing and that leads some societies to the lack of tolerance, diversity, and equality. In order to address these problems, contribute to the development of social cohesion and intercultural communication, we decided to carry out the project “Culteering”, which unites in itself words: culture and volunteering. We believe that volunteering can contribute to the raise of awareness about culture and its abilities to not divide us, but to unite us. Thus, we decided to combine volunteering with culture, promote it and make it work.

This project brings together countries from Baltics, Mediterranean and South Caucasian area, where 43 participants from 7 different cultures will acquire knowledge about volunteering, cultural understanding and how do they come along each other. They will discuss related topics, engage in brainstorming and creative thinking, play innovative games, prepare presentations and come up with innovative ideas about the projects that will include volunteering as a tool for cultural understanding. They will build partnerships and friendship among each other and a network for future activities.

Objectives of the project:
•Raise awareness about volunteering culture and promote it
•Raise cultural understanding among participants, their communities and the different parts of regions
•Introduce possibilities and opportunities for implementing projects related with culture and volunteering
•Create ideas and action plan for future projects that will involve volunteering as a tool for cultural understanding
•Identify and build partnerships for future cooperation

Activities

• During this youth exchange we are going to implement activities that will encourage creative and innovative thinking of participants in order to come up with interesting project ideas and find solutions to the problems related with the cultural understanding and volunteering. Discussions, workshops and interactive training will be used to ensure full and equal involvement of participants. The ice-breakers, energizers, role plays and games will be used in order to contribute to the better learning outcomes through the PBL (project-based learning) methodology. Quizzes and funny questionnaires will enable organizers to ensure the quality management and satisfaction of participants, as well as will be useful for final evaluation.
  The project brings together 37 participants aged 18-30 from 7 different countries from Baltic, Mediterranean and South Caucasian region. They represent different geographical, economic and social background and have different culture and regional communication. We are including people with fewer opportunities in our project. Youth with geographic, social and economic vulnerabilities (minorities, youth from rural and mountainous areas, target for discrimination because of social differences) will take part in this project. We give equal opportunity to everybody and try to make our projects as inclusive as possible. We will concentrate on having a gender balance for our project.

Impact

We expect that the project will: