The Fundació Catalunya Voluntària is engaged as one of the partners in the international project ´Mainstreaming Peace Education´ a KA2 project done in partnership with 4 more non-governmental youth organisations, from Germany, Georgia, Hungary and Poland, with the aim of fostering the culture of peace, which is sadly still far from the mainstream cultural mindset, being the context where we live (for thousands of years) the opposite: the culture of war, that glorifies power relationships based in violence, building narratives where it is positive to solve conflicts by being more violent than your ‘enemy’. To shift the cultural paradigm and move from a society (culture/economy) based on war and violence to a society based on peace and agreement, a powerful tool is education, reason why FCV is for a decade part of an informal group of NGOs that are promoting initiatives from which are resulting publications, aimed to support young leaders and educators to develop peace educational programs and youth-led peace initiatives. Done with support from the Erasmus+ program of the European Commission and the Hungarian National Agency, it has the following objectives:
- Creating educational resources for peace education programmes on competence development of young people.
- Establishing an international community of practice for shared learning and support on peace education as an instrument for local youth-led community development.
- Fostering the recognition of non-formal peace education as a tool for youth empowerment.
As a result of the contributions from the 5 NGOs and the support from experts (educators, researchers). civil society organizations and stakeholders, MPE project is foreseen to create the following outcomes:
- An online open educational resource, on community development and youth-led peace initiatives, combining peace education and non-formal learning methodology, useful to increase the skills of youth workers and educators, to organize both peace educational activities and youth-led peace initiatives.
- A peace competence framework for educators.
- A recognition mechanism, endorsed and supported by national and international stakeholders.
To learn more, you can download the toolkits produced by the MPE group, both of them edited by the NGO European Intercultural Forum (Germany): ‘Mainstreaming Peace Education in Youth Work, methodologies, approaches and visions’ and ‘Design Learning for Peace’
To find more about this initiative, and become part of it if you wish, please send an email to projectes@catalunyavoluntaria.cat (Lluc).