In Greece, a raising number of young people are excluded from basic social rights: employment, housing, education, health services, quality of food, representation and participation, living with dignity. During this project a core group of five young people was created. Through a fully participatory process we designed a three hours mobile workshop for young people, which is addressing the issues of discrimination and exclusion. The follow up will be the implementation of the workshop to various youth groups and the beginning of a network.

Currently in Greece, the situation for young people is very hard. In light of crisis all people are affected and significantly the youth. This fact results in exclusion of a large part of youth from basic social rights: work, housing, education, health services, quality of food, quality of life, representation and participation. The absence of an effective policy for the protection of young people and the general social crisis worsens this situation. These have resulted in the rise of the phenomenon of fascism, gangs, bullying, violent behaviour and marginalization of large proportion of young people. Young people often feel hopeless, helpless, believe in nothing and see no future.

In these conditions the need to survive drives a lot of young people to communicate with each other, exchange views and experiences and form small communities. At the same time a lot of initiatives and campaigns, mainly from social organizations and NGO’s, are taking place to raise awareness about human and youth rights and trying to support the people affected by crisis.

In this environment we, in ARSIS, found through the ENTER! project an excellent opportunity to start a long term project. At the beginning, to form a core youth group which working on the field of youth rights. Firstly, work together and then act as multipliers to other young people and groups with a view to create a network of active groups of young people in Athens. The project realised during ENTER! is the first step of the whole idea.

The core group (6 persons) formed after participating in a residential seminar that ARSIS organized. Then, during a fully participatory process, we worked to understand the current social situation in Greece and to perceive the position of young people in this environment and look for ways to promote youth rights.

We decided to do small but stable steps (no matter our big dreams!) because we noticed that this is essential if you want an initiative to last in time. Thus, we prepared, step by step, a mobile workshop for young people to engage with the issues of discrimination, exclusion (mainly from health, work, education) and youth rights. We designed the workshop to be flexible and adaptable to different ages, places or audiences. Also designed as a low cost workshop (actually no cost!) which we believe adds to our independence and flexibility. Through this procedure all of our team’s members improved their skills and competences. Every member of the team can run the workshop and this helps us to adapt ourselves to the crazy schedules which all we have because of the everyday running to different work, studies etc. Each time, the people that are available are taking part in the meetings!

Now, we are preparing the follow up project which will be the implementation of the mobile workshop with different youth audiences and will start in Autumn 2014. Our aim was to find other young people to communicate about our rights and support each other. We didn’t start some kind of a huge campaign. We looked next to us. To our friends, colleagues, neighbours or other groups, we or friends were involved in (theatre-music-sport groups and many more). We asked them if they have similar feelings about the reality and if they want to speak about youth rights through their participation in our mobile workshop. And guess what! We found out that a lot of people are interested in discussing and taking action for human/youth rights!

We want to link all the participants from the workshops by asking each group for a conclusion painting, photo, motto, song or whatever the participants want to present (about youth rights of course!). We will gather all these outcomes, forming an exhibition for youth rights which can be presented at various places, social centers and festivals. As a future project, we want also to bring together all these different groups, after their participation in the workshop, to explore possibilities of cooperation and new actions. In this way we want to see a growing network of aware and active young people talking and acting, individually and collectively, for our rights!

Stay tuned! Maybe you are the next member of this network!