Young and Adults for a Better Life: 2013

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Nomination for the Award Apple of quality for Grundtvig project Young

Dear friends and partners,

EPEKA is nominated for award Apple of quality for Grundtvig project Young
and Adults for a better life.
We are in top three nominated projects of 2011-2013 Grundtvig projects.
Already this is a great result.
Thank you everybody once again.
I wish you Merry Christmans and happy 2014.

Štefan Simončič

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Final products and dissemination in Italy

In order to make easier finding our final products and the last work referred to Dissemination (a Radio interview in Italian), we invite all visitors to enter the following web page:

http://wikizambigse.wikispaces.com/Young+and+adults+for+a+better+life

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The Site of the Project

Please visit the site of the project.
I am sure you will like it.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

The last day of our project

Dear friends,

Here we are at the end of our wonderful project.

I must confess I was very happy when many of you said that this project was the best project you had ever been in and I was also happy that you liked the way the project was coordinated.

The success of our project is the result of our fruitful international cooperation.

All of you did wonderful things in and for the project.

We managed to produce together valuable materials such as the brochure of good practices, the surveys on self-esteem, the questionnaire and the survey on the generation gap, the debates, workshops, interviews, role-play, computing or English lessons,..., all these activities involving more than 2500 people from our 11 European countries aged 16-80.

7669 people have visited the Blog so far.

38157 people have visited the site.

We can also add the people who read the newspaper articles or who attended the conferences meant to present our project to a very large audience.

And also, the fact that 2012 was the European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations it was a good opportunity for us to bring our direct contribution to the topic with the activities of our project dedicated exactly to the cooperation between "young" and "adults".

Both the project reunions and the activities in which we managed to involve young people and old people together proved that we can all share and learn one from another.

We spent delightful and inspiring moments together and managed to build a very friendly community.

I am pretty sure we will manage to continue our cooperation even if this project came to an end.

We will now begin to put together all our gains in the Final Report.

Thank you all for your dedication and hard work.

Mariana

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Viorica Parja- Graiul Maramuresului

Interview taken by Viorica Parja related to the visit to Sweden

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Czech short movie on Generation gap

During last few months Czech team was working on a short documentary movie called Generation Gap. This movie was created as a testimony of exhibition "Roma People are also Godly" but also as an individual final product of Grundtvig project Young and Adults for a Better Life.

In the movie you can see pictures from the exhibition including accompanying program - traditional Roma dances performed by girls and a short skit performed by Roma youth in cooperation with elderly clients of organization "Our World" taking care of people with health and mental diseases. Film brings also interviews with different people on the topic of generation gap.
Whole movie is in Czech language with English subtitles.

Film can be seen here.

I wish you an inspirational experience.

Veronika Schwarzová
Diocesan Caritas Ostrava-Opava

24th June, 2013

It is about a week that we have been back in Hungary but we are still full of new experiences, thoughts about our stay in Sweden.

Sweden for me first of all meant security, peace and lack of stress. It seems to be a country where things happen without a glitch, where people are for providing assistance and help to the individual when needed - instead of causing frustration and even humiliation.

We learnt about Sweden back many years ago that it is a country of social security – and this came back to me several times when walking in the streets of Stockholm, when talking to people in the parks, when watching the sun-bathers in the middle of a metropolitan at the side of a water front (I never knew whether it was the Baltic Sea or a lake) with clean water that is suitable for bathing in the middle of a city (here in Hungary we cannot bathe in the Danube due to pollution in the countryside either!).

We learnt why there are so many children and pregnant women in the parks (whereas the population of Hungary is diminishing each day), why the pensioners look so carefree while walking towards the museums for a guided tour and a light lunch with their friends, we learnt that there is no such thing as cold weather only not proper clothing for the external circumstances.

We enjoyed the large extension of the parks and green areas as well as the water reflecting the buildings and bridges running at different heights all over Stockholm.

We saw the colourful bunches of flowers, flags and presents greeting the school-leavers who arrived by boat to the embankment to celebrate the great day in the circle of their family and friends, we met the tourists visiting the sights and palaces, we even had a glimpse at the royal couple on their way to the festivities on the National Day on 6th June.

We talked to Hungarians having arrived in Sweden some 30 years ago and Italians married in Sweden and living here as Swedish citizens, we met families with coloured children whose cousins were convinced that they were „white” like themselves, we were explained how the Swedish state ensures that cleaning women of different origins did not do „black labour”.

We learned some basic pronounciation rules of the language and some words but of course everybody we contacted spoke English (and in most cases a good English).

We experienced the high level of prices and tasted the typical Swedish dishes, examined the richness of the goods on the shelves of the supermarket and did not buy anything – besides transport passes and entry tickets – and we realised there are certain occasions when it is positive to belong to the „older generation”: senior tickets are usually 70-80% of the original cost.

We are really grateful that we had this occasion to visit Stockholm and the countryside – without EU funding we would probably never have been able to afford such a trip.

Now we at least have some ideas how positive state policy can influence the individual s life, how society can be humanistic, how the individual behavour can be positively effected by common welfare.

It was clear that we, Hungarians still have a long way to go...

Kate Fazekas

Hungarian coordinator

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Upperby CDC Visit to Sweden

7 – 11 June 2013

Present: Carol Wilson, William Atkinson, and Jean Pooley

The focus for the visit to Sweden was:

To watch the remaining presentations from the countries who had not shown their information in Slovenia, regarding final products for their project
Discussion about the Final Report
To take part in a dance festival

Day 1

Early in the morning we all set off to the town where the dance festival was going to take place. All the participants from our project had been asked to dress up in their national costume. The UK team took part by wearing tee shirts with a Union Jack on them. We took blowers, flags to wave and our big English flag.

When we arrived at the town, we were met by Helena, who was organising the festival. Everyone was taking pictures of each other and the atmosphere was really good. People were very happy to be taking part. For us, the uk team were delighted to have been asked to take part in the festival.

When it was time to go to the school, we all marched along the road, all very happy, waving flags and cheering the people who were standing along the road waiting to see us.

We arrived at the school and were shown to our seats. There were a lot of local people already there. We were given a programme of events. When I looked at it I didn’t realise how big and event this was. There were lots of different acts taking place from several different countries.

After a few hours it was our turn to take the stage. We all went on the stage and sang to the audience. It was a song that the Italian team had written about our project. I don’t think we were the best of singers, but at least we all made an effort.

When the dance festival was over we were taken back to the “forest” where we had our evening meal and then had free time.

Day 2

At the beginning of the second day the countries who had not presented their presentations had their chance to show them.

After a short break, we continued with the presentations.

After lunch we were all invited to take part in a dance session. Helena had asked a colleague to come and give us experience of dancing all together.

Following our evening meal, Mariana invited everyone to the hostel where she was staying. She had decided that because of some communication problems within the group, we all needed to get together and have a good night singing and dancing. This was a very good night, everyone enjoyed themselves. Traditional songs and dances were carried out by each country.

Day 3

Evaluation Day. This was held in the morning with a group discussion. We also held a discussion about the final report and what we should all be writing in it.

In the afternoon, we had some free time, so we went for a walk in the forest with Helena. This was very enjoyable and informative.

As we had to leave early the next morning most of the group had an early dinner and nigh

The positive points we will remember from our visit are:

Our hosts were always on hand to help us

We gained an increased understanding of the different problems in the different countries to the interaction between the generations - whilst also gaining an understanding of the areas we all had in common.