Together with partners from Algeria and France, the G.A.T.E. project was realized in Germany.
Our G.A.T.E. Project focused on empowering young, engaged people to become active citizens and Green Ambassadors. We followed on how to teach through a bottom-up approach to promote city-level and trans-local awareness-raising on the need to establish new social and environmental connections among young individuals of marginal multiethnic and polluted neighborhoods/areas. G.A.T.E. empowered socio-ecological awareness and capacity building on cause-and-effect aspects of environmental circularity through the socio-political representation of the young locals in the target areas.
The peculiarity of the project was the realization of two ambivalent and interconnected processes. The project’s protagonists were young individuals with very different backgrounds, i.e., fewer opportunities to live in deprived areas of the cities, unemployed, students, and marginalized youngsters. Therefore, they had a double role in the functionality and implementation of the activities.
1) RAISING AWARENESS
In the first part, they were subjected to awareness-raising and training courses on sustainable development, UNSDGs, and climate change issues on relevant factors. Moreover, informal and non-formal learning methods were carried out to make the participants aware of the area’s socio-environmental conditions.
2) BECOMING AMBASSADORS
In the second part of the project, the youngsters played the role of ambassadors. Thanks to their personal experiences (consciousness) and the knowledge they gained, they were in charge of creating their own ideas on how to educate their communities or direct environments about the global socio-environmental situation.
The participants have been actively involved in the design and implementation of the G.A.T.E. project – the local team members reached out to the youngsters and asked them different questions to get an idea of their needs. The participants contributed directly to the capacity-building activity by answering the questionnaire as the team contextualized their challenges and needs. During the youth exchange in Germany, the participants seized the opportunity to create a safer space. During the last two workshop days, they were creative and designed different deliverables to raise awareness for green topics in groups. They shaped their activity based on the knowledge they learned from the inputs and inspirations during the workshop days before. The activities will be used in multiplier events in each country locally by the participants in a peer-to-peer concept or even openly in their communities with different stakeholders (schools, the general public, municipality, etc.).
