Youth seminar on human rights aspect of environment and sustainable development 25 – 28 November 2010, Belgrade, Serbia
Introduction
The All different – all equal Serbia with support of Council of Europe European Youth Foundation, Green Forum Sweden and Ministry of Youth and Sports Republic of Serbia, is announcing a call for participation in the international youth seminar on human rights aspect of environment and sustainable development “Be aware, act and care” that will take place from November 25 th to 28th in Belgrade, Serbia.
Summary
Environment protection and sustainable development are interrelated topics that represent today an essential part of human living and an explicit socio-cultural element that is, many ways, an introductory part of any human rights education. Mediterranean and Balkans regions have undergone turmoil in the past and today are streaming toward peaceful future based on democracy and human rights respect, people are starting to feel a need for action in order to keep environment safe and build sustainable societies. This is the topic through which we can overcome the obstacles of biases and build up the overwhelming need of acceptance and care of new generations.
Objectives of the conference are:
As environment and sustainable development are being recognized by the Council of Europe as
specific topic in the field of Human Rights Education with this project we aim to support it and:
- Develop new modules for human rights education in environment and sustainable development on the bases of existing manuals and methodologies in the field
- Raise awareness about our living conditions and state of environment and determine the connection between action and consequences altogether, with personal responsibility for the quality of our and others ́ life
- Motive participants to think globally and act locally and provide concrete examples and methods for everyday actions that can contribute to better living conditions and protect environment for our generation and future generations
- Exchange ideas about future community and cross-border actions that can be started in the Mediterranean and Balkan region and build up network to exchange information and provide young people as well as educators with possibilities to learn and act in their community
- Design specific approach to current social and economic reality of an area in which the educational activity takes place in order to be able to raise awareness and motivate the communities to act
Methodology/program
The seminar will combine lectures, debates, case studies, workshops and brainstorm exercises. We will start the program with introducing general information about the threats of environmental ignorance and continue with the raising awareness of living in the conditions being inappropriate for life due to human activity. Next program step will be to introduce through different human right modules links between environmental responsibility, individual autonomy, inclusive democracy, social justice, gender equality and safe, peaceful and free society. Concrete examples may be used as warning and the education should include the showing of some parallels between the processes
that has led to such situation and the processes that are happening right now.
The seminar will be interactive through its course and will exercise both the existing knowledge and experience of the participants and known learning methods and conclusions developed by the
experts and the prep team. This makes the project innovative in nature together with the fact that this is one of the first attempts to build tools for HRE in these topics.
Participants
The participants to this event should be already engaged in youth organisations in their country or region and should be motivated to learn more about the key themes of the seminar, contribute to the debates and be willing to share this knowledge gained with the others, acting as multipliers.
Priority will be given to organisations working with sustainability issues but we aim to have diversity there also as well as general geographical (gender/age balance of the group. We will use the open call for participants procedure for this event with the application forms.
Financial conditions
Selected participants should arrange their travel in most environmental friendly and economic way.
The travel reimbursement will be provided by the organisers upon presentation of all original receipts. Depending on the total sum of travel costs of all participants, we might have to reduce a bit 100% reimbursement to stay within the budget, however, this information will be shared with participants prior to purchasing the ticket and starting the trip to Belgrade.
The participation fee for this seminar is set to be 25 euro and should be paid at the beginning of the seminar. In order to accommodate everyone’s financial possibilities of taking part in this event, we are able to provide deduction of the fee for some of the participants based on the written requests to the organisers prior to the seminar.
All those interested in applying are kindly asked to fill in and send the appended application form to the email address info@youthserbia.org no later than NOVEMBER 15th 2010, at 2.00 p.m. CET.
