CIVIL SOCIETY: 269 PRACTICES
Goals:
informing and raising awareness of children on the issues of refugee flows and human rights
approach to human rights values.
empathy
development of positive attitudes and behavior towards immigrants, refugees and the refugee issue
students: children and young people aged 5-18 years
divided into 3 units depending on the age group targeted:
Unit 1: «Children from around the world»
age group: 5-7 years old
Unit 2: «From me to you»
age group: 7-11 years old
Unit 3: «Seeking a homeland»
age group 11- 18 years old
We began on September 2016 an we are running our Project until today
The Greek Guiding Association is running the Campaign «A World in a Suitcase», based on the educational program "Refugee flows, human rights and interculturalism ", a program that for the first time is applied in Greek schools. Designed and implemented by the Greek Guiding Association, under the auspices of: UNCHR, Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, Region of Attica and Central Union of Greek Municipalities. The goal is to raise awareness to children and young people for human rights and especially for refugees , through experiental activities.
From 2016, a special trained volunteers' team implement the program to all over Greece, while accordingly we deliver special seminars to teachers who are interested.
For a 2nd year, under the approval of the Ministry of Education, we continue running our Campaign, encouraging volunteerism and raising awareness to children, young people and teachers for the refugee issue.
September 2016 - February 2018
Greece:
· 20 cities
with participants:
· 3.849 students
· 181 volunteers (Guides and non Guides)
· 180 teachers
while in the seminars we have trained:
· 530 teachers
We have presented our Program to the International Convention "SYN POLITIA" : "Vulnerable social groups, partnerships and perspectives. We also delivered presentation in other occasion, where we were asked, such as the Internation Conference of Guides in India, a leadership seminar for young women in Malaisia, in a European Network meeting of Guides and Scouts in Budapest.
The evaluations, we have received after our actions, confirm us how these experiential activities helped kids and adults thinking differently, increasing their sense of solidarity and feeling more empathy about refugees, immigrants and in general about people who are facing difficult situations. On the other hand, we got to realize how familiar are these situations to Greece. We are immigrants now, we were refugees back in the years. People were sharing their experiences or their parents’ experiences regarding these issues with so much passion and we were the ones giving them the opportunity to express themselves in a safe space, as we learn and do in Guides and helping them to create a sense of community. Some examples where students used our Program as a seed for further actions: Α school created a human rights' exhibition an in a city in the north Greece, after our activities, students decided to create a "diary" collecting refugees stories from their grandparents who were refugees and from refugees who are currently arriving in Greece.
We implement our Program all over Greece while we are promoting globally our Campaign.
Through this Program, we have partnered with many institutions, mainly with Associations that are invlolved in education of children and young people, such as: Ministry of Education, Schools, Univeristies, Libraries, Municipalities, other NGOs who are interested implementing the program to their audience.
There is one Project-Manager/ Employee and she coordinates the Program all over Greece with a group of volunteers. The Greek Guiding Association has local departments all over Greece and that' s how we can coordinate national the implementation of this Campaign.
Visibility: Through this campaign, we became visible, apart from the students and teachers, and to many other educational institutions who now recognize as an Organization with a quality pedagogical approach, part of the society who is interested and can deal with refugee issues, specialized to children. Other institutions, for example, after they have been informed for our Program, they called us to lead activities for refugee children that are leaving in their regions. An interesting action that we implemented is that we called refugee teenagers who are living in the refugee camps, to participate in our 3 days Meeting with participants teenagers from all over Greece. Our goal was the integration and we think we reach it by letting all the teenagers participating equally in every activity.
Volunteerism: Through Projects, designed and implemented with quality, that responds to the need of the society, we can built a stronger identity as an organization. We noticed that some former members of our Organization, after launching this Campaign, they got in touch with us and they participated even though they haven’t been recently active in Guiding. So, these kind of Programs can attract also volunteers, showing how relevant and useful is our Organization to today’s society!
We went even further for the refugees action and we are in contact with other NGOs and municipalities to plan a Project for refugees integration on the greek community.
