YOU THRIVE
It must be truly communal and a real service
You Thrive engages students in School Community Service in a transformative way. The program involves young people as partners in innovative activities that give them the civic, democratic and participatory skills that are (almost) completely missing from public education.
Together, we can implement participatory programs within the framework of the SCS which have been rarely done before in Hungary. School Participatory Budgeting, Youth Social Hackathon, Public Opinion and After School Facility Council.
Learn more about us!
The Aspect Group is a coalition of four civil communities from four cities (Debrecen, Miskolc, Pécs and Szeged) working together for democracy.
Survey
We are asking teachers, educators and secondary school workers to share their thoughts on School Community Service. It will be a great help to create a program that reflects real needs.
Step by step
Milestones in the You Thrive program
Connection
Contacting educational institutions, teachers, youth workers, social workers, youth organisations.
Survey and interview
Based directly on the relevant experiences of stakeholders, we get a real insight into the functioning of the SCS, so we can design a program that responds to real needs.
Future Workshop
Starting new platforms with local professionals and stakeholders that can provide new professional directions with civic education linked to the SCS.
Methodology
A manual containing different youth participatory methods tried and tested by the Aspect Group.
Participatory projects
Local Youth Participatory Pilot Projects in Debrecen, Miskolc, Pécs and Szeged.
The program will run from August 2023 to July 2024, in line with the school year. It is a pilot program, so in the first year, networking, information gathering and surveys will take place at national level, while later activities will be implemented in four cities as a start. If You Thrive is successful, there are plans to extend the program.
You Thrive’s primary target group is young people aged 14 to 18 years old in secondary school who are about to start – or have already started – School Community Service. An important target group is all teachers who are SCS coordinators and teachers with experience in SCS. And we are counting on representatives of youth organisations and groups who would like to be involved in the process as implementing partners.
An important aspect is that young people will be both target group and implementing partners, with real responsibilities and challenges. We will implement together participatory projects that have been no precedent in Hungary – especially involving young people. Such programs are the School Participatory Budgeting, the Youth Social Hackathon, the Public Opinion, which develops a culture of debate, or the After School Facility Council. In the first year, we will implement a smaller element of these methods, while in the longer term we will implement whole processes.
In addition to the participatory programs, we will publish a free-to-use professional booklet on the different youth participatory methods used by the Aspect Group. The knowledge contained in this manual can be freely used and further developed by colleagues working in the same field. The most important result will be to reach out to students who, after the program, will be socially active in other youth programs or in the civic sector.
Members of the Aspect Group. In Debrecen the Alternative Communities Association, in Miskolc the Dialogue Association, in Pécs the The Power of Humanity Foundation and in Szeged the Motivation Educational Association. You Thrive is an important part of our network’s longer-term objective. In a few years’ time, “today’s young people” will become adults sensitive to social issues and local public affairs, who in the future can create an increasingly strong, autonomous and sustainable civil society – also in rural areas. The main goal of the Aspectus Group is to provide a complex, supportive, accompanying, mentoring environment for young people, guiding them from secondary school to young adulthood on their path to active citizenship.
The four organisations have similar processes in their city: identifying potential partners, building relationships, gathering information and organising Future Workshops. Among the participatory programs, each organization is implementing a different pilot, one in which it does not yet have its own experience. In addition to involving young people, it is important to further strengthen the knowledge transfer between the members of the Aspect Group and to implement increasingly complex processes at local level. The four organisations will thus play both a mentoring and a mentored role.
You Thrive is part of the Central Europe Civic Engagement Project. CECEP is a partnership between the National Democratic Institute (NDI), DemNet in Hungary and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in Poland.
Don’t hesitate: send us an e-mail to info@aspektus.hu!