Fast development is characteristic of our world. Everything nowadays runs in the speed of light. In most cases, people tend to forget the most important things that are supposed to be forming a safe and respectful community. Simple things like peace and equality.

The group of people that seems to pay even less attention to these important matters is youth. Young people of all ages do not seem to understand the importance of certain principles which need to lead our societies and as a result, they neglect them completely. Principles like Solidarity and Tolerance and being tossed out the window and are being replaced with egoism and antagonism.

This attitude can cause severe problems for every local society. And measures need to be taken in an effort to make improvements and eventually eliminate the problems that have been caused and might be caused in the future.

In the European area, there is a growing need for solutions. Local societies are suffering and without proper actions, the problem will not be solved. This is were European Projects come in. The innovative nature of the European calls brings together people and organizations from every European and Non-European country aiming at giving solutions to major and minor problems that might threaten the very foundation on which the EU was built.

One of these projects is the project RE.S.P.E.C.T: Youths’ REspect of Solidarity, Peace, Equality, Citizenship, and Tolerance through creativity.  The project aims at bringing together an international synergy of partners with the same need. The need to develop to youths, the sense of respect of solidarity, peace, equality, citizenship and tolerance in an effort to facilitate in this way, the social inclusion of young people belonging to cultural minorities.

The project focuses on target groups such as youth workers, trainers, artists involved in youth education as well as young people belonging to cultural minority groups. The first results that expected through this project is the professional development of each partner organization through its members who will learn various non-formal methods from the fields of participatory arts and digital approaches in order to develop a culture of diversity. 

Another result is to raise awareness on the respect for diversity during the training events as well as the awareness-raising campaign “Youth RE.S.P.E.C.T. thru Cre8ivity. During project time, the youth workers of our organizations will acquire multiple working practices improving their work with youth; also they will acquire skills and competences in the field of cultural diversity. The competencies gained by youth workers during the project time will be transferred to the young people they worked with during 3 short training events.

Objectives

Here are the 3 objectives of the project:

1. To increase the professional development of each partner usually through European collaboration, through non-formal and intercultural learning for managing cultural diversity by means of 3 Short-term joint staff training events. 
2. To strengthen the networking among partners developing a new learning e-tool “Youth RE.S.P.E.C.T.”, a web TV channel as a true resource of international value, bringing together the best European practices to facilitate social inclusion of young people belonging to different cultural minority groups
3. To launch an awareness-raising campaign “Youth RE.S.P.E.C.T thru Cre8tivity“

Strong projects with a deep impact like the RESPECT project are needed to make a difference in the European Society. Become an active citizen and take part in these projects, to help support and enhance the European Area.