Education

Project background

The project is financially supported by the Erasmus+ programme

Young people are currently not very active in public and political life. For a well-functioning society, it is essential that young citizens participate in shaping it, not least because they (young people under 19) make up 20% of the population of the Czech Republic (according to the Czech Statistical Office).

The reason for the reluctance of many young people to become actively involved, according to Human Rights in Need surveys, is their lack of awareness of how they can get involved in public affairs and their general indifference to the subject. In this respect, school education is less and less a source of information about current social and political events. Young people identify social networks as the main source, and in their case it is often a source of incomplete and unverified information.

Therefore, there is a need to develop activities that help to increase young people’s knowledge of civic education, inform them about opportunities to get involved in public affairs and motivate them to be active.

Objectives of the project

The general objective of the project is to strengthen the democratic sense and civic engagement of young people. The project aims to achieve this through the following sub-objectives:

– The project will develop young people’s civic knowledge and skills

– The project will enable the participants to identify topics and issues that are important to them in the field of civic participation (e.g. what young people want to address in the municipality, etc.)

– The project will identify and map the needs of young people in terms of what ways and tools of participation and involvement in issues important to them are understandable and interesting to them

Target groups

All activities will mainly target the group of young people aged 13-19 years. Secondarily, the general and professional public, namely educators and decision makers/public officials. As well as individuals who have teaching skills and experience in delivering educational programmes with knowledge of civic participation.

Main activities

– Consultations with young active citizens: structured interviews with at least 15 young active citizens belonging to the target group (13-19 or up to 26 years old) will be the input for the development of the research questions for the follow-up focus groups. Representatives of these young and civically experienced people will be further involved in the project as mentors in the next activity – the autumn school.

– Focus groups survey: diverse groups of young people from different parts of the Czech Republic will attend a min. 2 hour interactive discussion programme facilitated by a moderator. The aim will be to find out to what extent the group is engaged, what interests these young people and what prevents them from doing so. It will also test which participation tools are relevant for the group.

– Educational workshop: following the focus group, each group will attend a workshop to interactively teach participants why and how to be an active citizen.

– Autumn school of civic activism for young people: the aim of the school is to further develop the participants’ knowledge and skills in active citizenship and also to test an online learning tool with the help of the participants.

– Education and information campaign among a wide group of young people