DBYN trains volunteers to speak up for young refugees

Sunday 27th April 2016 brought 22 participants from 9 different countries to Vienna for the 6-day European training course ‘Speak Up!’. An intensive course on youth advocacy and refugees ran by Don Bosco Youth-Net.  The training course aimed to develop competences of the participants in developing and implementing advocacy actions while focussing on the impact on local, regional, national and European level, in particular policies affecting young refugees.

The programme had a competence-based approach. First we focused on building a reference framework for the participants. They  start-off with a simulation game about refugees and border officials. We focused on defining refugees and thinking more deeply about refugee issues facing our society.  Stakeholder analysis allowed the participants to consider the role of government, media, NGOs and citizens in advocacy, before they shared the current situations regarding refugees in our home countries.

Later on the participants looked at Human Rights. What are Human Rights, refugee rights and using a Human Rights based approach in projects. A guest speaking from the Fundamental Rights Agency gave the participants an overview of the FRA’s work and Human Rights today in Europe.
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Further, we started to focus on the skills of the participants. With a session on how to structure a campaign followed by learning about campaigns with Jugend Eine Welt, the participants learnt about the practicalities of advocacy work and the different processes in a campaign. Later on, they could explore campaigns by the Council of Europe. Finally, the participants looked at needs, objectives and outcomes of these campaigns, before presenting them.
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The participants were challenged to train their competences in developing a campaign in support of refugees, aimed at different target groups (youth centres, schools, general public), including developing 2 workshops for the following 2 activities of DB4R. They got feedback on their campaign to enable them to improve and develop campaigns to take home to their organisations.

Watch the video report to get a feel of the training course: 

This training course was part of DBYN’s ‘Don Bosco 4 Refugees’ project. It is co-funded by the Council of Europe through its European Youth Foundation.