Solidarity is About Youth

The Solidarity is About Youth: The voice of fraternity (SAY) is an educational response to growing negative trends including racism, discrimination, and social exclusion. Since 2017, every year, students from France, Poland, Croatia, Spain, Italy and Slovenia send postcards with messages of solidarity to randomly chosen people. The topics pictured in the photos are chosen by students and reflect the young peoples’ beliefs on what are the most pressing societal problems (the most important being: mental health crises, poverty, migration, transport exclusion, gender inequalities, climate change, discrimination, intergenerational dialogue). The program consists of a series of workshops, where students are trained in critical thinking and photo analysis.

What do we offer in the programme?

educational material to talk about important social issues such as social inequalities, climate change, migration or mental health problems
training with experienced trainers on how to run image analysis and writing workshops with students
ready-made scripts for anti-discrimination classes, image analysis and writing workshops.

What will you learn from the programme?

what elements make up image analysis and the importance of photography in shaping our consciousness
how to encourage young people to write personal messages without guidelines and rigid rules
how, through critical image analysis and conversation, we can teach about openness towards others and break down stereotypes
how to encourage young people to express themselves and form their own opinions.

I often talk to students about important issues, but with this programme and the hours we spent analysing first the photos and then writing the cards, I actually felt that we had done something really great and good. I think it gave the students a lot to know that their thoughts, their words were important and that it was their message of solidarity that would reach a complete stranger.

teacher, secondary school

The programme draws the attention of children and young people to important themes, such as solidarity, tolerance, poverty, migration and racism. The programme is designed so that it can be carried out with both younger and older children. I think that the project gains in attractiveness due to the fact that the children's activities have a measurable character - receiving feedback.

teacher, primary school

In Poland, the programme involved:

schools and kindergartens

teachers

students

Solidarity is About Youth: The voice of fraternity program is co-funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus + programme and run by: La Ligue de l’enseignement in France, Fundacion CIVES in Spain, CMS, Center for Peace Studies in Croatia, Humanitas in Slovenia, ARCI in Italy and School with Class Foundation in Poland.

Project’s international website: www.fraternity-card.eu.