A 3-days training for 20 youth activists took place between February 13-15. 2020. in Valaska, Slovakia together with volunteer counselors who are trained to work with Roma youth in the future. The training run for Roma and non-Roma young people, who will soon become the voices for those not being heard, and it was led by Juraj Vozár and Jana Harušťáková.
97% of young people are social media users, so if we want to reach them, we have to catch them on social media. Most of the time, we use social media ad hoc, but in case it is a series of coordinated activities, we can use it for advocacy, such as about raising the awareness about the needs of young Roma or about the successes of young Roma people around us.
This training in Slovakia was a pilot to develop educational tools and methodology to develop a social media campaign, which could be used and shared by and with our partnership in our joint work as we are implementing regular social media campaigns.
Throughout this training how to start from “what I want to share” to “what tools I will use to create the content” and they have learned tools which they can use for free to create more attractive messages, posts as well as discussed the “advantages and disadvantages” of the different channels and the profile of their users, for instance on TikTok you can share very short videos but its followed by lots of teenagers.
After getting a basic understanding about how social media work, participants learnt more about what a good story is and what are the rules to follow when you are creating a post, which helps you to catch your audience. Through these discussions, by the third day, participants finalized their own campaign plan, to run around May 16 – Romani resistance day and to share personal resistance stories of young Roma. This was a kick off brainstorming for our joint May 16 campaign run on the Roma Youth Voices Facebook page in May 2020.
The training was organized by RGDTS in co-operation with Association of Young Roma as part of the Roma Youth Voices project, funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the DG Justice, European Commission.
