Another successful round of workshops in the MultiKулти youth center culminated with an open event where the outcomes were presented. The event, called CUBE: THE EXHIBITION, gathered around 150 people in the Cultural Center of Kumanovo on the 10th of December 2016.
For two hours, the locals of Kumanovo had the chance to explore and to admire the outcomes from the workshops: the theatre workshop prepared short sketches on social topics, with the participants dressed and painted as mimes; the Strip workshop provided the people with copies of their publication; the eco workshop prepared a video titled “Turn towards the GREEN”, while the motivation workshop pleased the crowd with a song and prepared a motivational calendar with empowering sentences for each month.
The innovation of this round of workshops is that it gave space to the young people to propose, create and open their own questions on the subject of inter-ethnic dialogue, intercultural learning and communication. Besides promoting and fostering youth participation and youth activism, the workshops, as usual, challenged the status-quo of Kumanovo and highlighting the beauty of working together as a united community.
The young people who were selected to implement their ideas into a workshop received a mentor who helped them throughout the sessions. Here are some impressions from the mentors of the workshops:
Arta Abduli, Cartoon workshop:
During these three months I facilitated the workshop With Strip Against Discrimination. This workshop was a little more specific from the others, because we learned specific techniques about drawing a strip. This year the method of the work was different, we had one mentor and two leaders. The mentor was helping the leaders with using the non-formal education techniques in their activities. The group was formed and from the beginning of the workshop we had a clear idea of what our final product would be. The participants decided to have two different strips and they were divided in two groups. The atmosphere in the group was perfect and we had good collaboration with each other. Without hesitation I can say that this was one of the best groups I ever managed in a multicultural workshop.
Mario Denkovski, Motivation workshop:
The participants of the Motivation workshop had a chance to go through a process of realizing their self-motivation abilities and the ways they can improve, change or develop themselves. The facilitators and I as a mentor used creative methods, collage making and music to achieve the goals of the workshop. The main objectives of the workshop were:
- Understanding why one lacks confidence and motivation.
- Understanding the definition of confidence and what that means for individuals.
- Improving one´s self-esteem by using specific positive thought and expectation techniques.
- Boosting confidence, self-esteem and motivation.
- Improving one´s confidence when dealing with people.
- Learning how to inspire and motivate oneself
The final product of this workshop was a Motivation Calendar. All the participants chose and prepared one month of the year (January, February, etc.) by using the mosaic drawing technique and put some sentences or quotes that motivate them.
As a mentor, I went to the high school to advertise the workshop. After 16 presentations, the workshop gathered 15 participants. During the workshops I provided them with all the materials they needed, facilitated the team-building and provided assistance to the facilitators. Also on one of the workshops I helped the participants to create a beautiful motivational song, which was sang during the presentation of outcomes in the Cultural Center.
The full photo gallery of the event can be viewed here.
The MultiKулти Social Youth Services is a project implemented in 2016 and supported by UNDP Macedonia.