<< Objectives >>After our successful first Youth Exchange (Human Rights. For Everyone! Everywhere! - 19-K11-026) we want to use the experiences that we have made by planning, preparing and implementing this project to give even more teenagers the chance of participating in such a Youth Exchange. We stick to the key ideas of our past project (topic: human rights, target group: minor participants with fewer opportunities), but redraft the project proposal from scratch and utilize our gained experiences to improve this project, to adapt it even better to the participant's needs and to enhance and refine the non-formal learning methods used.With this project, we strive to give young people from Austria and Romania the opportunity to meet in a safe space, to acquire intercultural experiences and competencies and to form new cross-border friendships. They should be able to deal with the important topic of human rights and the principles of liberal democracy, and we especially want to impart the core values behind these subjects. We would like to see our participants integrating these values in their daily thinking and acting to facilitate a long-term impact on their own lives and their social environment. Our teenagers should be enabled to stand up for their own rights, but should also be encouraged to respect the rights of their fellows and to defend their rights as well, while also reflecting on their own behaviour towards other human beings. We want to support our participants in their development to open-minded individuals who see diversity as a chance. Participating in this Youth Exchange will have a positive effect on their personal development and will increase their self-confidence and self-esteem. Moreover, it is our goal to see significant improvements of the participant's level of English, which is facilitated by the cross-country communication during this project.Besides that, we also want to contribute to European Integration and build, even if just on a small scale, new bridges in Europe. Furthermore, we seek to emphasize the importance of solidarity and mutual respect in a community. This Youth Exchange and the values imparted by it should animate the young people to become responsible and participating citizens who actively take part in political decision making processes on all political levels.<< Implementation >>For five days, the teenagers deal with human rights and other connected subjects (children's rights, gender equality), before they finally develop their own ideas about how to make the world a better place. For this purpose, we are using a diverse mixture of non-formal / informal learning methods. We design our activities in a way to make sure that the project is mostly based on what is coming from the participants (i.e. their own ideas and opinions). At first, there will be various, playful activities to allow them to get to know each other. During the whole week, we include games in our agenda, which should enhance group dynamics, concentration and communication and which often have an indirect connection with the topic of human rights. Besides dealing with the main subject, there certainly is enough time to discover the city center of Vienna and to allow the participants to explore the city on their own in groups by doing a Selfie-Rallye. At the end of the week, we don't want to miss the opportunity to have a final picnic at the Donauinsel. Another important aspect are daily reflexion activities that allow us to support the young people in digesting their intercultural experiences and to make them aware of their learning progress. These reflexion activities also enable us to gather important feedback for our ongoing evaluation and for necessary adaptations.We want to make it possible for 10-12 participants from Austria and 10-12 participants from Romania to take part in this project, and they should be accompanied and supported by 4 group leaders/trainers. Our participants are mainly youths with fewer opportunities (for example generally socially and economically disadvantaged, low education, minorities, refugees). For most of them, this will be their first stay abroad ever and the Erasmus+ grant is crucial for their ability to participate in this project.While our focus is clearly on the mentioned young people with fewer opportunities and our project is adapted to their needs, it is still important for us to also have participants with less or no disadvantages and with a higher level of education, as we see this as an important key to inclusion and we believe that this allowes the participants to learn from each other and to help each other overcoming language barriers.<< Results >>Our expectation is that this project will have a strong an long lasting impact on our participants and their lives, but we also hope to see further impacts on the teenagers' environment (their friends, family and other people around them). The young people participating in this Youth Exchange will, first of all, make extensive intercultural experiences and will therefore acquire intercultural competencies. They also will deal with the subject of human rights and the princples of democracy, but they will also discuss how to live together peacefully in a society that includes everybody. By learning about human rights and the underlying core values, they will integrate these values in their daily thinking and acting, facilitating a long-term impact on their own lives and their social environment. In the course of our activities, they will become more aware about their own rights and will also be encouraged to respect and defend the rights of their fellow human beings. Additionally, participating in this project will have a very positive effect on their personal development and will increase their self-confidence and their self-esteem. We also expect the participants' level of English to improve due to the cross-country communication.We expect an impact on the teenagers' environment because the participants take the experiences and the imparted values home to their friends, family and to all the other people around them. That way, every single young person participating in this project becomes a little multiplicator.Furthermore, we expect a positive impact on organizations and individuals concerned with implementing this project by gaining new experiences, acquiring additional competencies in youth work and in realizing international projects and by learning about new perspectives during the exchange with international partners.We certainly won't change the world with this little project, but we can change the world of our young participants - this is our goal and this is the terrific feeling that gives us the energy to prepare and carry out this Youth Exchange.

"<< Objectives >>Our first goal was to enable 14- to 17-years-old teenagers from Austria and Romania to acquire intercultural experiences in a new environment and to acquire important new competencies. We especially wanted to support young people with fewer opportunities for whom such experiences are not possible without the Erasmus+ funding for various reasons. During this Youth Exchange, our participants should actively deal with the subject of human rights. They should tihnk about how people can live together in our society as good as possible. Our project should raise awareness about human rights, children's rights and gender equality as well as the principles of liberal democracy. To do so, we wanted to use various non-formal learning methods to foster understanding of the ideas behind human rights and liberal democracy. By doing so, we wanted to achieve that the young participants deeply integrate the fundamental values of these concepts in their way of thinking and acting. Eventually, the teenagers should become aware of their own rights and should be encouraged to stand up for these rights. At the same time, they also should understand the rights of their fellow human beings and reflect their own behaviour towards other people. Apart from that, we also hoped that our participants could share the imparted values with their social environment.Another important point was to allow the teenagers to improve their English language skills and to realize how important and useful foreign languages are. We also wanted this project to have a positive influence on the personal development on the young people involved and to raise their self-esteem and self-confidence.Another key goal was to create and strengthen European cross-country-bonds between the participants. They also should think about their own possibilities to participate in social and political matters. It was of high importance for us to make the young people aware of the importance of mutual respect, tolerance and solidarity in a community.But not just the teenagers, also the organizations and individuals organizing this Youth exchange should make important new experiences. Besides the huge potential of improving our capabilities in working in international teams, we also believed that we can get to learn new perspectives by exchanging with our colleagues from abroad. All this should improve our capacity in youth work and allow us to offer even better services and activities for our target groups in the future.<< Implementation >>While we initially (before the pandemic) had planned our project for 15 participants between 14 and 17 years from each country, we reduced this number to 11, as we believe that this number allows us to pay more attention to the individual needs of our participants and to have a better and more productive atmosphere. Many of our participants are disadvantaged due to different reasons (e.g. refugees, minorities, general social disadvantages, low education, ...). At the same time, we also wanted to have some participants that are not disadvantaged to improve the participants possibility of learning from each other. This also has made it much easier for them to communicate despite language barriers.During our Youth Exchange we had one key topic for every day from Monday to Friday (Monday: Getting to know each other, Tuesday: Human rights, Wednesday: Children's rights, Thursday: Women's rights, Friday: Democracy). We have carried out various interative activities about these topics, while we kept the inputs as short as possible, as it was our target to have our discussions mainly based on what is coming from the participants. Most of our methods were realized in mixed groups (Austrian/Romanian), also for allocating the groups we used diverse, playful methods.Besides our content-related activities, we also visited the Vienna city center, had a Selfie-Rallye in the inner city and organized a football match with other teenagers from Vienna in cooperation with the association ""Rettet das Kind"". On Wednesday evening we had a intercultural music- and dance evening, giving every participant the chance to choose one song from their home-country on YouTube and also encouraging the participants to teach each other dances. On the last day, we had a picnic at the Donauinsel.<< Results >>Our project definitely created cross-country bonds between the participants and we will do everything we can to support the participants in staying in touch with their new friends from abroad. The dynamic between the teenagers was even better than expected and we believe that, at least for this small number of young people, we truly managed to build new bridges within Europe.We had participants who already came with remarkable English skills and they had a chance to practice even more. We had participants with a very low level of English and they noticed how easy it is to learn new words while communicating with their colleagues from abroad, stating that during this week they have learned more English than in months at school.Our project has certainly raised awareness about human rights, children's rights and gender equality. Our participants also learned some facts and gathered knowledge about these topics, but our main goal was not to teach them facts and figures, we wanted to impart values and understanding, and these values should have a lasting effect on our participants and their environment.We believe that this Youth Exchange had the intended positive effect on personal development, self-esteem and self-confidence. The participants could also learn a lot about other cultures, reduce prejudices and improve their capabilities to cooperate with people from other countries.We are not naive, our project won't change the world, it won't solve any of the big problems our society faces, but it certainly has changed the world of our participating young people and also of us as organizers and group leaders - and this is what was important for us during this week, a week everybody who has been part of it will never forget."