SIX STEPS TO GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP

How is the world connected?

How the decisions made in EU affect the lives of people around the world?

How the problems and disasters that happen in other parts of the globe affect the lives of EU residents?

How can we as citizens contribute to meeting global challenges?

This is the agenda of the new long-term European initiative “GlobaLab-2: Six Steps to Global Citizenship” implemented by 4 organisations from Lithuania, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Spain.

Global citizenship is becoming crucial for every young person in this fast changing and interconnected world. The global society faces a number of challenges, which affect every human being. Migration trends, increasing diversity in the societies, military conflicts and economic sanctions makes a significant impact on every citizen. For this reason people need skills to critically assess the issues and identify their approaches in local, national, European and global contexts. They need to become sensitive for the issues having impact for sustainable development of the EU and the whole globe. Citizens need to understand the reasons of the global issues, their consequences to the European and global society and to be able to take an active civic role towards making the world more just, peaceful and sustainable.

In order to broaden civic participation of young people and enable them to contribute to meeting global challenges, 4 organisations from Lithuania, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Spain joined into partnership to implement the project “GlobaLab-2: Six Steps to Global Citizenship”. The project aims to improve the quality of youth work and join efforts of youth and educational bodies towards making young people promoters of global citizenship. The GlobaLab-2 project will be a laboratory for young people, where they will have an opportunity to think of the issues they face every day from the global perspective. It will allow them to find their own role in the global society, as well as stimulate their behavioural change in order to contribute to sustainable development both locally and globally. The project will also allow its participants to identify the effects of the global issues to their own lives and make them become more active and responsible by changing their own views, attitudes and daily habits.

“Today young people need a strong belief that they can make a difference in this global society. Furthermore, they need to demonstrate solidarity, tolerance, respect for diversity and human dignity in order to be the ambassadors of global citizenship in their communities. The partners of GlobaLab-2 project will pay significant attention to promote these values in all project activities”, says Indre Augutiene, the general manager of the project.

During 2 years of the project lifetime GlobaLab-2 will engage around 380 participants: young people, who will be provided with the opportunities to increase and apply their global citizenship competencies; youth workers and youth leaders who will be given the possibility to improve their professional competence and embed global citizenship into their daily work; educators and youth policy makers, who will inform the process of development of a common framework for active global citizenship in partner countries.

The project will develop a number of outputs aimed to create, pilot and share good global citizenship education practices. They will include publications, joint educational frameworks, learning/teaching resources, ICT-based learning tools, interactive resources summarizing good global citizenship practices in partner countries. The outputs will be piloted and embedded into youth work and non-formal education practices with the help of a number of national and international training and multiplier events.

The project is being implemented with the financial support of European Commission, Erasmus+ programme.