EU-Wise Young Citizens-Consumers
EUWISE young citizens-consumers is a long term Erasmus+ project that started in December 2020 and ends in November 2022 (2 years). Coordinated by the Youth Association from Transylvania, a grassroots NGO from Romania, it gathers 5 entities from Belgium, Italy, Poland and Romania, who are working together with the purpose of raising awareness and upscaling various sustainable production and consumption practices, all the while also empowering youth with fewer opportunities.
Objectives
EUWISE young citizens-consumers aims to combine generic youth empowerment activities with sustainable development tools and strategies in order to empower 120 young people as agents of change in four EU Countries: Romania, Poland, Italy and Belgium.
The project also aims to enhance the acquisition of social and civic competences, foster knowledge, understanding and ownership of values and fundamental rights. It focuses on active engagement of the EU young people, in major debates and actions, whilst promoting a change of attitude towards their consumption patterns.
EU-WISE also collects and disseminates good practices to support the role of young people as active partners in the implementation of SDG4 (Quality of Education) and SDG12 (Responsible Production and Consumption). By widening and strengthening existing networks, such as Fair Trade and Slow Food, the project aims at transferring and upscaling these good practices within and beyond the countries that are covered by the consortium.
Partners
Project School is a start-up company based in Italy and Belgium aimed at strengthening the creative and design skills of individuals and organisations willing to develop solutions to small and big challenges in their communities. We seek to boost the potential of our partners and users to enhance their capacity to create social impact, by using the most innovative techniques in the social field.
The Polish Fair Trade Association (PFTA) was created in 2003 by a group of Fair Trade enthusiasts. The PFTA is an organization which contributes to the fight with hunger and poverty, promotes responsible consumption and Fair Trade. Through its statutory objectives the PFTA provides actions on global education, raises society’s awareness of sustainable development, responsible consumption and Fair Trade. Since 2009, the PFTA has been involved in the Fair Trade Friendly Communities campaign, which is the equivalent of Fair Trade Towns. The PFTA is member of the World Fair Trade Organization.
The Fair Trade Advocacy Office (FTAO), located in Brussels, is an independent foundation, born in 2004 as a joint initiative of Fairtrade International, the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO) and its European branch (WFTO-Europe). The FTAO’s goal is to represent all the actors of the Fair Trade Movement in the global challenge towards change, greater Trade Justice and better livelihoods and life conditions for producers in the Global South.
The advocacy activities of the FTAO are addressed to the EU and concern the need to create and implement policies supporting a fairer trade at the European level.
Equo Garantito is the National Assembly of Italian Fair Trade organizations – a non-profit organization that promotes the values of Fair Trade and fair economy in Italy through awareness raising activities, lobbying and advocacy, the monitoring of its members according to the Italian Charter of Fair Trade and WFTO principles. Its network is composed by 65 member organisations running more than 180 World Shops around Italy counting on the support of more than 3500 committed volunteers and working with 200 Producer Organizations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The Youth Association from Transylvania, is an NGO from Romania that works strategically on developing, promoting and representing the interests of our communities in Transylvanian and ensuring the active involvement of youth by having social, cultural, sporting, educational, recreational and professional training and volunteering activities in the areas of sustainable development, inclusion, entrepreneurship, emotional management and innovation. Our Motto: To show Europe to Transylvania and Transylvania to Europe!
The rationale for the project is grounded on the enormous potential for young people to develop skills to create alternative ways of ensuring inclusive, resilient, and sustainable societies.
Through a bottom-up approach, it fosters the role of young people as “agents” and “catalysts” for change by identifying, analysing, and disseminating good practices that build their capacity to promote sustainable lifestyles and attitudes in their communities (e.g. trainings, political support, dialogue opportunities, and education and awareness raising).
Moreover, it fills contribute to a comprehensive approach to sustainable consumption which includes the principles of relevant and complementary movements such as Slow Food, Fair Trade, the Circular Economy Movements.
Attila Nagy
Pilot Actions
FAIR GAME is a fun card game created by a group of young people participating in the EU-Wise Young Citizens-Consumers project with the support of Equo Garantito.
The game allows for the involvement of a minimum of two to a maximum of 5 players (9 players in the case of combining two decks of cards), ages 6 and up.
Taking inspiration from a very popular game, in FAIR GAME players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an “explosion” card: environmental exploitation, child exploitation, green washing, and inequality cards in fact get you out of the game! You continue by taking turns drawing until only one player remains. Other cards (and card combinations) reduce your chances of being eliminated. ALTERNATIVE cards, or Fair Trade principles, save from elimination, but care is needed because danger is around the corner. In the face of poor wages, record deforestation, worker exploitation and inequity, it is up to all of us to try to win this game.
Each card has its effect indicated in both Italian and English.
The complete deck consists of 56 cards. Download the deck of cards: front – back.
The rules for playing can be found at this link.
project outputs
In our publication, we present 25 good practices collected in 2021 by our partners.
What is a good practice for us?
It is something that is necessary for young people and citizens, with the aim of empowering them. It is an activity that encourages every participant to be more involved, so we decided to focus on practices that could appeal to people in a broader sense.
We know that these are truly some of the best practices, as they have all been tested on the field: young people and NGOs engaged in very dynamic and diverse activities, with successful outcomes, that can be easily duplicated even with a larger number of participants.
Tailor-made training programmes have been implemented to train for 50 hours more than 30 young people in each country of the project, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Romania.
Thanks to the general framework that has been co-designed, the partners shared common structure and topics. Two courses, in English and Italian, have been uploaded on fairsharetraining.eu, Equo Garantito’s e-learning platform dedicated to fair trade.
As a result of the training programme, the young participants supported by project partners developed at least three concepts for Pilot Actions per country to be implemented in the communities for fostering the principles of fair trade and sustainable development.
A practical guide to train and empower youth to be advocates of sustainable production and consumption: the perfect place to find new activism ideas and practices and new ways to involve more young people in your organisation!
You can download the Toolkit here.
In October, there was an important concluding event, the Fair Trade Advocacy Marathon, in the framework of the annual Fair Trade Breakfast organised by FTAO. It took place in Bruxelles and it allowed the Youth Leaders to meet some Members of the European Parliament and ask them to commit to the safeguard of human and environmental rights in international supply chains. The Youth Leaders demanded more control on the international supply chains, which often hide situations of exploitation in the Global South. They also discussed the HREDD Directive, which would make it compulsory for corporations to identify, prevent, and mitigate the impacts on human rights and the environment along their global supply chains.
Subscribe to the EUWISE project’s courses on fairsharetraining.eu to learn sustainable development tools and strategies for youngsters.
Fair Share LMS is a training and learning platform for students, teachers and citizens interested in fair trade and sustainability.
