Daria Mazina, Anoushka Orquin, Lola Gonzalez & Aoife Curran
Momentum hosted a celebration for International Women’s Day on March 8th with an afternoon tea and chat about wellbeing with youth in our communities. Inclusion EU Project Specialist, Lola Gonzalez, organized this event with the help from EU Project Specialist Samantha Carty and intern Aoife Curran. Young ladies from different nationalities who live in Leitrim were invited.
We had two of our guests speak to the audience. Daria Mazina, a young Ukrainian refugee, spoke about her volunteer work with Carrick-on-Shannon Tidy Towns for the past months. She shared how volunteering has been good for her integration into the community. She also gives her time as a translator to Leitrim County Council and to the Community Car Scheme when transporting Ukrainians to medical appointments. She feels this has helped her wellbeing during her transition into a new country. Anoushka Orquin spoke about her work as a video editor and gave a few tips to guests at the event. She works with Apple but in her spare time creates brilliant content related to pop culture on her youtube channel. These activities have helped her remain healthy and grounded in the new county which became home during Covid times.
Samantha Carty, Aoife Curran & Lola Gonzalez
All attendees heard about project Wellhoody from Lola Gonzalez who is Momentum’s Inclusion and EU Project Specialist. The Good Practices Guide was completed last year. This is a guide that researches, collects, and presents 20 good practices of youth participation in diverse communities that have significant positive outcomes for inclusion and wellbeing. Our Open Education Resources will encourage community and youth educators to take responsibility for the wellbeing of young people and promote the strengths that being part of a diverse community bring. The Wellhoody Clubs will ensure that we respond to key headline EU challenges through a unique, engaging, modern, and participatory method, using in-person and online networking as a basis for embedding youth in wellbeing.
We look forward to inviting youth in our communities to join in participation starting this summer. We cannot forget our Wellhoody Platform and Online Course which will be an interactive learning digital platform. We see the course as able to facilitate collaboration, promote peer-to-peer learning, and encourage cross-project fertilization of ideas to accelerate learning.
Overall, it was a very successful event. There was great conversation around our Wellhoody resources of which our guide is now online. We look forward to developing this project further during the rest of the year. We have a brilliant team from different European countries which include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denmark, Ireland, France, Germany, and Sweden. Our goal is to build healthy youth communities which recognize the strengths that come from diversity and help them to welcome everyone.
Dramblys is committed to positive social change and responsible leadership that works for the promotion of social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Our aim is to combine sociological imagination and inquiry with social creativity to approach and explore solutions to the emerging social problems in order to strengthen local capacity and foster social creativity.
We design and implement a range of training programmers and social activities and campaigns based on learning-centred, participatory and experiential methodologies, for the promotion of life-learning and active global citizenship.
Our work target diversity from various projects at European level and local level (focusing on the migrant community and especially on migrant women). The Wellhoody project has been a reinforcement on our vision and efforts on the importance of diversity but this time with a focus on youth.
One of the main highlights of the Wellhoody project for Dramblys has been its first result, the Good Practice Guide, which brings together examples of projects which’s activities promote diversity or even use it as the foundations of their initiatives in order to contribute to the integration of young people with a migrant background (migrants or native-born migrants) and to increase their wellbeing along with their community’s.
As a leader of this part of the project, the Dramblys team has spent substantial time going through all the best practices and has gained a very solid understanding of how the wellbeing beneficial initiatives work and has been able to reproduce several of them at local level.
One of them has been to offer cultural activities in collaboration with the city’s Youth Centre for young people, taking them through the local cultural and historical heritage and by doing so enhancing their knowledge and participation in citizen and cultural life. The underlying principle is that the more these young people get acquainted with the locality and the diversity it has embodied through the centuries, the more they will fell included in the modern society.
Again, at European level, we are targeting underprivileged youth through cultural activities in different cultural and heritage project. Some of the proposed activities go in line with some of the examples included the Wellhoody Good Practice Guide.
At local level, the Wellhoody project and its good practices have been promoted to organizations who work with women (local and from migrant communities) and carry out activities that tackle their mental health and wellbeing through creative activities (such as craft and elements of performing arts) as well as providing further training for their participation in the labour market. Dramblys has collaborated with them through talks (where the Wellhoody project has been presented) and activities that target and promote diversity in particular.
Finally, the Wellhoody project has been promoted in meetings and consultations with partners of other European projects in the field of youth as a way to exchange good practices of what are considered successful projects and also to explore synergies and ideas for future collaborations. The project has also been shared in Dramblys social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Website and Linked In.
Outside Media & Knowledge is our partner from Germany, Baden-Wurrtenberg. They EDUCATE young people, women, and hard-to-reach groups on how only through both inclusion and integration while respecting each other’s freedoms, we can build a happy future.
These are the principles they integrate into all their training sessions, workshops, and meetups.
To make their training interactive and participatory, we use media, in particular, written stories and video, to advocate for full & functional togetherness throughout Europe, they show the beauty of European stories and boost youth participation in these stories.
They ADVOCATE for acceptance and understanding between people of different cultural, racial, ethnic, and other backgrounds, through their Outside Multicultural Magazine. The online magazine reaches multicultural groups, fighting the negative narrative about migrants and new community members in general. It uses storytelling and showcasing through video, interviews, and case studies, to spread the messages of women, youth, and other marginalised groups, longing for equality, inclusion, and belonging.
How about you continue this day by being inspired? Watch the WELLHOODY videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx9lzp1BxpAG4o04Bj0OWEeVVxnkqoI1a