Date: 19.02 – 21.02.2021 (Online) and 26.02. – 28.02.2021 Organizer: Grenzenlos – interkultureller Austausch
Partners involved: Concordia Uk, Pi Youth Association Turkey, IJGD Germany, Verein Junger Freiwilliger e.V Germany, JAVVA Belgium, Union Forum, Ukraine and The Yellow House, UK.
“I learnt that I should be more aware of gender inequalities and speak up more when I notice something wrong”
Aims and Objectives were:
✪ To implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals and provide thinking and future actions for promoting gender equality and women’s development.
✪ To discuss each country’s situation about gender equality.
✪ To Promote Gender Equality activities in IVS.
✪ To introduce experience from different countries that can help women.
✪ To share participants’ or organization’s idea about how to promote gender equality.
✪ To interact with different organisations that work for Gender Equality
“I was surprised to see in how many ways people are active in the fight for gender equality on Instagram, or with art, games and theatre”
Grenzenlos has been running international projects and exchanges for 70 years. In the last years, we dedicated our trainings and seminars to the topics of civil courage, human rights, inclusion and peace-work. With this webinar, we wanted to share and get more knowledge in dealing with Gender Equality in international volunteering work. Gender Equality has been one of the most recurrent topics in the last years, we have seen fights for the rights of women and LGTBQ+ all over the world, but there is still much and some of that can be started at home. We had the chance to share and receive experience and knowledge on how to better promote Gender Equality work with different partner organisations. We created a space for reflection that, due to the current situation, had to do be entirely online.
“I want to talk to my organisation and ask if they can do gender trainings more often”
We divided the seminar into two weekends. During the first part, international experts from the youth sector gave us a theoretical background on many aspects of Gender Equality. We began with the definition of “gender” and analysed the division of labour as well as the gender roles in the small setting of the family. We then moved on to analyse the bigger picture of society reflecting who benefits from these gender roles. We ended the day by looking at gender roles in the media, especially in the advertising sector. The last day of this first weekend started with our presentations of gender-equality role models; we continued analysing gender stereotypes and inequalities, with a focus on our specific countries. The weekend ended with our personal reflections on how we can be activists in the fight for equality, inspired by the real-life example of Artemisia Gentileschi in the 1600’s.
“I want to integrate our solutions into our next camps and work”
The second part of the seminar was a more practical one. After getting to know each other better on the first day, we began a long Saturday by thinking about the daily life of volunteers and about the process of planning events or seminars for volunteers.We identified 15 real-life scenarios and issues of Gender Equality in the reality of volunteer work. Examples such as positive discrimination, sexism, harassment, lack of information and openness to discuss some topics, exclusion , and gender roles. Some of these also came from personal experiences. We then split into smaller groups to discuss these issues and brainstorm for possible solutions. On the last day, we shared our group work with all other participants and evaluated the proposed solutions. We then reflected on how to specifically implement and share the results of the seminar, so that we can now apply and reflect these in our work and organisations.
We are extremely happy with the outcomes and we thank all the participants and partners of the seminars.
“Sometimes it’s very difficult for me to put my thoughts into words, but these discussions helped me practice”
The results of the Working Groups of the Webinar
Trainers and support team
Daniele Samparisi, Zhang Man and Carlos Gauna Vargas