The KA2 project "Civic Debate Club" was an initiative that focused on encouraging social responsibility and active participation of youth in decision-making processes, fostering mutual understanding through inclusivity, constructive engagement and networking, encouraging youth participation and advocacy via practical application of digital youth work strategies and raising awareness of active citizenship and civic responsibility within the youth work sector and to policy makers and funders nationally and EU wide.
The project was coordinated by Youth for Equality (Slovakia) and implemented by GEYC alongside The Future Now Association (Bulgaria), Europsky Dialog (Slovakia) and University of Peloponnese (Greece).
During the project, 5 multiplier events were organised and the consortium created and published 52 free to download resources, among which infographics on attitudes, perceptions and misconceptions of governance among young people, videos, a podcast, a story map on the best available resources worldwide for debating and active citizenship, a curriculum about how to organise debate clubs in your community in all the partner’s languages and a research report. All materials are available on the project website.
Between 3-5 of May, the project also organised a joint staff training for youth workers in Athens, Greece, where they were hosted by the University of Peloponnese and learnt how to facilitate civic debate clubs.
The project concluded with its final conference in Trnava, Slovakia on 14th September 2023. During the conference, we talked about the Civic Debate Club Outputs, we had a workshop that consisted of a simulation of a debate and a panel discussion on The role of Civic Debate Clubs, where our colleague Irod Roxana was one of the panellists.
Until now, the project gathered almost 3000 views on its website and impacted around 200 direct stakeholders.
Testimonials:
„I really enjoyed representing GEYC during the final conference of a project that is so dear to me. It was a pleasure to be a speaker for the final panel discussion and talk about the importance of debates and convey the youth worker's perspective of their role in nurturing civic engagement and active citizenship.” (Irod Roxana, Democracy & Human Rights Assistant)
„For me, as a teacher who uses debate as a method of teaching and training active citizenship skills, it was an opportunity to get in touch with the young participants of the conference, as well as representatives of the organisations partnering in the project. I can say with certainty that I returned home to my classes and my students with a lot of positive energy, new knowledge and plans for educational projects, extracurricular activities and collaborations.” (Drugă Florentina, teacher at Elena Cuza National College, Bucharest)