“Variety is the spice of life” is the outcome of the project with the same name which was implemented by YEU and funded by Erasmus Plus through BIJ – Le Bureau International Jeunesse, the French Speaking National Agency of Belgium. This publication is for youth workers, trainers, and facilitators dealing with gender issues with the main objective of familiarising the participants with activities and games that they can in turn implement in their respective organisations with the young people they work with.
The vision behind “Variety is the spice of life” is an open-minded and tolerant society which provides equal opportunities to everyone no matter their background or personal characteristics. This project was directly inspired by the results and outputs of a previous YEU year long process, which focused on the development of innovative NFE tools and methodologies to address the topic of intercultural dialogue from a gender perspective. Through this process, 6 new and innovative tools and approaches were developed and tested by the young people who took part. The project directly engaged 22 youth workers active in youth organisations and/or local multicultural/migrant communities across Europe together with 420 young people of different backgrounds from those local communities. The participants dedicated themselves to experimenting with a series of activities based on tackling cultural and gender norms also in relation to the life cycle. In pairs, participants conducted these activities to explore how effective and or appropriate they were in tackling gender issues.
The publication is divided into three main sections, each section representing a stage of life: Birth, Adulthood, and the Third Age. Each of these sections is broken down into five subtopics. The information for these subtopics came from the research and knowledge of the participants and teams of facilitators and trainers working with them. The process built the capacities of youth workers on how to input the gender perspective into intercultural and intergenerational dialogue as a transversal issue in their everyday work and activities, especially when working with migrant communities.
Overall, this publication aims to be a resource which can encourage youth workers, educators, trainers, young people and youth organisations to question current practices and promote new ones, by (re)thinking and (de)constructing cultural and gender norms in local communities. The publication can be downloaded at the following link: https://issuu.com/yeu-international/docs/variety_is_the_spice_of_life.
