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It is apparent that, in many fields such as labour, rights enjoyment, social discriminations and political participation, gender gap is a fact. For the European Commission, gender inequality has been at the core of discussions since the creation of the Roadmap for equality between women and men in 2006, followed by the EU Plan of Action on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Development in 2016. The growing gender violence among young people (WHO data: over 10,000 deaths in one year in Europe), particularly millennials, requires a deep understanding of the phenomenon and an effective implementation of innovative practices in terms of preemption in youth working through digital practices and countering-hatred approach.Plus, with the presence of new challenges in terms of digital education as well as intercultural issues, partly due to recent migrations and flows of refugees, gender as an autonomous theme of discussion has partly lost its track and its impact in terms of public opinion. As youth trends with reference to gender roles and growing sexual violence, particularly in the cyber-space, are becoming a structural situation, we have shown a strong need in radically changing such a situation by investing in high-quality youth working. However, empirically, many associations in Europe still treat gender issues more as an add-on to their work than as a structural issue. This means that gender matters are reduced to a simple ratio balance (e.g. how many men/women are involved in a training course), to how the concrete accommodation of participants is arranged, or only to the organisation of special courses aimed at ‘solving’ the issue. On the other hand, the GENDERS project has entailed a systematic attempt to focus on a simple yet complex methodology to make gender mainstreaming feasible and attractive for young people and youth workers new to the topic. GENDERS has focused on gender-mainstreaming as a way to support youth organisations in assessing their work through gender lenses, would it be when it comes to their structure (board of members, decision-making mechanisms, etc.), their youth work activities, their internal and external communication, and the level of equity in the involvement of their volunteers. The focus of the project has also been on young people to challenge and break down stereotypes and to address youth who often ignore or are not prepared enough to counter traditional and inflexible gender roles, substantially repeating existing models.Our work has been to create a simple way to self-assess one’s youth organisation through an online questionnaire on gender-friendliness - the idea has been to set up a tool to convert input data into a measurable outcome that could guide young people of youth organisations to have a clear idea about their work on gender mainstreaming.The ICT tool has been integrated into www.gendersproject.eu, a web-platform which also offers support from problem identification, awareness and creative solution ideas for collective decision-making, as well as new practices to be included in youth working activities in the technical features of an e-learning environment. The ICT tool and the information and methodology in it has been compiled based on 1) national research carried out in all the project partners’ countries, which emphasised the current needs and existing practices on the topic 2) the input and feedback from youth at the three training events organised 3) the input and feedback from youth at the many dissemination activities organised by different partners. The three trainings organised within the project played a specific role in the development of the final output: participants of C1 were asked for input and discussed the methodology and topics needed to be addressed, participants of C2 were beta-testing the platform, giving further input and feedback and participants of C3 were using the platform as a learning tool, giving feedback to the final details. The target groups of the trainings were thus selected accordingly, C1 and C2 were targeted towards staff, youth workers and trainers working on gender mainstreaming, while C3 was targeted towards youth and youth workers not knowledgeable or involved in the topic yet.In addition to the participants of the trainings, many other target groups were involved in the project. The many dissemination activities and side projects of the partners involved thousands more young people all around Europe. Workshops, presentations of and consultations on the platform were conducted with youth. Experts, policy- and decision-makers and other NGO representatives were involved in conferences, panel discussions and activities to bring youth together with the important stakeholders of the field.The project has been supported by four partners coming from Belgium, Spain, Italy and Romania active in gender education in the youth field in Europe.
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