Reclaiming Physical and Virtual Spaces
While the globalized market takes an increasingly larger share of the public awareness by providing a manufactured, impersonal, generic 'consumable' culture, youth groups and individuals find more difficulty accessing public space and exploring personal diversities.
This project aims to prevent youth becoming merely subjects to social, political and economic differences, instead becoming creators and developers of culture, gaining experiences and knowledge to confidently assert objective viewpoints and suggest tangible solutions. Concretely, this will mean volunteers taking an active role in the activities of organizations that provide forms of space for youth discourse and visibility.
The project is intended to be a way to provide youth with a self-organized, self-maintained platform to develop ideas and opinions on social and political events, and encourage them to claim the public space to convey them. The project is not only a cross-border exchange of different cultural and demographic backgrounds, but a skill-sharing exchange of varying methods of communication of ideas; specifically open space internet forums, artistic exhibitions, social events, political involvements and discursive meetings.
Volunteers selected for project are from Turkey, Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Slovenia, and will work on the open space web platform www.openESF.net and in various social and cultural centres across Europe, from March 2009-2010.
Biketour 2009 - Sustainable transport in the Western Balkans
From February 2009, two Dutch volunteers will work in Banja Luka, Bosnia, on the long-running Biketour project. Biketour consists of a group of people from all over Europe, forming a sustainable mobile community, cycling a two or three week route across a part of Europe. As the Ecotopia meeting which has been connected with Biketour has now ceased to be an EYFA project, the destination of this years Biketour is as yet unknown. However, the volunteers will be involved in discussions and planning of the route which will visit local projects and events across the western Balkans, bringing international attention to local issues, and promoting sustainable transport along the way.
Bi-lateral EVS: Tackle Global Climate Change
In May 2009 one volunteer started in EYFA for a one-year EVS. The volunteer contributed to two big projects on the issue of climate change in 2009. A Dutch/Belgian Climate Action Camp was organized in August on the Dutch/Belgium border in a collaboration with Dutch and Belgium environmental and youth organizations. At the end of 2009 EYFA organized a youth exchange in Copenhagen alongside the climate summit of the United Nations. The volunteer was involved in the implementation of both projects, and organized info events in the Netherlands to raise awareness on both events and the bigger topic of climate change.