Challenge Diversity (Georgia, 16-22 Nov 2019)
In November 16-23, 2019, 42 participants from six countries: Georgia, Hungary, Armenia, Italy, Ukraine, Latvia had a unique chance to participate in the Erasmus+ youth exchange project “Challenge diversity” organised by Civil Development and Research Institute and Youth Bridges Budapest. The project took place in Tbilisi, Georgia.
The main goal of “Challenge Diversity” was to make youngsters of various cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic background gather and interchange ideas to support developing of democratic and inclusive society. The duration of the program was seven days, which provided various opportunities to develop key competences: Communication in foreign languages, Learning to learn, Social and civic competences, Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship and Cultural awareness and expression. Besides participants improved time management and decision making skills by establishing variety of indoor and outdoor activities.
The goal was not only gaining knowledge, but also developing social skills, such as critical thinking, group working and problem solving.
Csenge Kolozsvari, president of the Youth Bridges Budapestshared her thoughts
about the program: “I’ve participated in a lot of
Erasmus+ programs before, but this is the first leading
experience. The results are even better than expected due to motivated working
of all the groups.”
Armenian Group leader Karen Ghazaryan noted the importance of the program was that the participants were free to interact with each other. The friendly and tolerant atmosphere which started from the first day and lasted until the end wascrucial. As he said: “The main achievement for me, besides gaining new ideas, was to start to get to know other cultures closer. Huge benefit of the project was that I made good friends from different countries.The effectiveness of any program can be measured after the end of the project, I consider Challenge Diversity successful because I keep in touch with many of the participants up to date and we plan to work together to organize a new project.”
The main difficulty the participants might encounter throughout this kind of projects, could be the distinct classification of the tasks and responsibilities. As the project participants noted,this project was different from many other ones,because it did not have any problems and obstacles. The activities were divided in advance between national groups according to days, so that all international and national teams were very well integrated, coordinated and cooperative.
“challenge diversity” gave me a huge experience and a lot of positive emotions. I met new people from Italy, Armenia, Latvia, Hungary and Ukraine. We shared our knowledge and information about our countries and traditions. Out of many interesting activities I would distinguished one that aimed to understand the idea of tolerance and how different people from different cultures have very diverse understanding of it. Despite so many differences, in the end of the project we became one big family. That was an amazing experience,”- Tamar Tsiklauri Georgian participant told us.
According to Sandra Varju(Youth Bridges Budapest), this
project was significant by the fact that you could not find
groups separated by their nationalities. During both
the indoor and outdoor activities including organizing open space activities, the groups were formed on the
multicultural basis.
Aslan Artmeladze a representative of Civil development and Research Institute highlights the importance of Erasmus+ youth exchange programs. “It is a huge motivation for young people to develop inter-cultural skills and get to know different ideas from different people – which is huge encouragement for youth economic and social development,”- he said.
Throughout the project, we broadened horizon for bringing positive changes withing the societies. Except the planned agenda, we had extra curricula activities: teams of journalists, experts, social media managers, paparazzi were working during breaks to gather maximum possible outcome from the project. We also discussed future cooperation in terms of planning and implementing other youth projects and create more opportunities for youth to actively participate in shaping our society.
Taking into account opinions and ideas shared by the participants and organizers we can surely come up with the statement, that Challenge Diversity was successfully implemented project. This kind of Erasmus+ programs are important in developing individuals from different parts of the world as confident and open-minded members of the society, who are ready to face challenge diversity and contribute to the formation of the society which respects values of democracy, tolerance and human rights.
