Youths to get int’l human rights exposure through strategic YCG partnership

Mar 23, 2016 News

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With the primary aim of advancing human rights education among young people, Youth Challenge Guyana

(YCG) was recently able to forge a strategic partnership with the Intercultural Institute of Timisoara in Romania. The partnership, according to YCG’s Executive Director, Mr. Dmitri Nicholson, is aimed at encouraging Human Rights exchanges between Guyana and countries within Eastern Europe.
Activities related to this collaboration are being funded by the European Commission and are promoted under the theme ‘Human Rights Start With Breakfast’. The collaboration is designed to bring innovation and strengthen awareness in the area of human rights education for youths.
In addition to Guyana and Romania, the initiative includes participation from France (Reunion), Denmark, Italy and Peru.
The YCG Director and Samantha Humphrey, also of YCG, visited Romania earlier this month to help develop and concretise the details of Guyana’s involvement.
“We were able to develop a partnership where we were able to find common ground on creating exchange opportunities for persons to go to other countries to understand human rights there and develop skills to be able to teach and include human rights in their work here,” said Nicholson.
But Guyana’s inclusion was not by chance.  According to Nicholson, YCG has always had an interest in developing international partnerships, whereby local persons could be given an opportunity to understand other cultures.
The recently forged collaboration had its genesis last year when YCG worked closely with the European Union. It has thus far seen YCG and the Intercultural Institute Timisoara inking a contract that will guide the partnership.
The main aim of the project is to strengthen the capacity of civil society organisations that work with young people from the partner countries to develop an effective, coherent, inclusive and sustainable framework for using human rights education.
As such the objectives of the projects are: to develop competences in human rights education for 30 youth workers from the partner organisations; to develop basic competences in human rights for 300 young persons from the partner organisations; to increase the cooperation at local and regional level between different stakeholders (schools/Non Governmental Organisations and community); to promote active citizenship and human rights values; to increase the personal and professional development for six youths from Peru and Guyana during seven months of international volunteering and to create an interactive, user-friendly and accessible platform for human rights education.
Persons who are currently involved in youth organisations and are not older than 40 years of age are invited to apply to participate in the venture, which according to Nicholson, will be announced publicly.
“A key output is that we want to be able to expose persons working with youths in Guyana to a different environment and space so that they can learn how youth work is done there. Often, yes, we do very good work in our country, but at the same time we have never seen or learnt about anything that other people are doing in other countries, and we learn from the internet, which might not necessarily give us all the right information,” Nicholson considered.
He pointed out too that the collaboration will in essence serve to encourage the practice of Guyanese travelling to other territories to learn about the culture there, rather than only embrace the norm of persons coming to learn here.
“Our intention is to develop a cadre of leaders who understand youth work, not only in Guyana’s context, but they can learn from other countries and apply it to Guyana’s context,” Nicholson stressed.
The project involves three important parts. Among them is an international training course for youth workers, which includes local activities done by those youth workers. This aspect is intended to help ensure that the methods shared are used and that the local community is benefiting from the international project.
During the project, efforts will be made to develop an interactive e-platform that will engage youth workers and youth in an interactive way, to create alternative online activities.
Following the exposure of selected youths, it is expected that they will implement the use of their knowledge through YCG or other organisations to which they are attached.
“They will be conducting different types of training that will enhance human rights education and when we speak about human rights in this context, we do not mean human rights for one particular group, but rather, enhancing human rights for everyone in the country,” Nicholson asserted.

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