Project Hope - Croatia and the United States

The project uses face-to-face interaction and various kinds of media to train youth and youth workers in youth development and experiential learning strategies. In 2000, a team of 7 GK personnel (4 youth leaders and 3 adult staff) completed a 3-week peer education and leadership programme at 3 sites in Croatia; in 2001, 2 young people and 2 adults participated. In general, the project has 4 major components:

• Youth leadership/citizenry training led by a diverse team of GK leaders for their peers in Croatia. In 2000, 30 young people and 10 youth workers from Croatia were trained in workshop development, facilitation, and project planning (with the aim that the programme would be sustainable after GK's departure). For instance, nightly workshops on prejudice, censorship, youth empowerment, human rights, and health issues were conducted.
• The development of a curriculum package on human rights and peacebuilding, including an interactive workshop, a youth-produced video, and radio segment. Specifically, workshop materials detailing procedures and communication strategies on such topics as "Democracy, Cultural Diversity, and Human Rights", substance abuse, tolerance, and censorship are available online. The video, which was prepared to honour USA Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's peacebuilding efforts, features individual young Croatians and Americans speaking about peace in their country, peacebuilding in general, and Holbrooke's efforts in particular. Click here to view the 2-minute piece. A radio segment aired on New York's WBAI 99.5 FM during the GK programme "Youth Pulse".
• Follow-up technical assistance on developing youth leadership programmes for partnering Croatian organisations.
• A joint social action project implemented through the Internet - the groups stay in touch, in part through tools such as the project (year 2000) page on GK site. There, individual journals written by participants, as well as photos, can be viewed.

Clearly, this project is designed to nurture efforts to build youth leadership programmes in Croatia, increasing opportunities for skills transfer supportive of stronger democratic institutions and civic participation. The young people in Croatia trained through Project Hope facilitate workshops in local schools and run their own leadership groups at several sites. However, the process is designed to facilitate new understanding on the part of youth from both countries. After returning to the United States, GK leaders conduct presentations and workshops on the project themes. In this sense, they become active citizen "diplomats" who have an international perspective to add to their USA-based peer education work. The hope is that, instead of seeing the issue of diversity as simply black or white, these leaders will have a chance to develop a broader vision of the dynamics of prejudice and racism. The idea is that they can expose their USA peers to these new insights into how power and nationalism play into politics and the formation of hate groups.

Youth, Diversity, Rights, Democracy.

GK provides the following context for Project Hope. The Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia in December 1995, recognised borders, established power sharing in Bosnia, and provided for the return of refugees to all affected areas of the former Yugoslavia. Still today, GK claims, many destroyed homes have yet to be repaired and many refugees still do not feel that it is safe to return to their homeland. Many have begun new lives elsewhere. Milosevic and other perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing and mass killings are still at large, even though they have been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity and genocide.

Global Kids is a NYC-based educational organisation dedicated to supporting urban youth's development as community leaders and global citizens. Project Hope has been part of a long-term relationship that GK has established with Croatia-based agencies that are seeking to establish youth development programmes, promote democracy and civic participation, and develop cross-community activities after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.