The pilot PEACE programme was launched in January 2018 with the arrival of nine students from Indonesia, India and Thailand who are hosted in Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland. Activities such as ‘GC in You’ and the Active Project have been developed as part of the programme and its active global citizenship theme. One of the objectives of the programme is that participants will gain more competences on the concept of Global Citizenship and the feeling of responsibility towards our common global society. Additionally throughout the programme and during the final camp they will be given the tools that will allow them to be more active in their communities and hopefully the inspiration for becoming future change makers.
The 2018 pilot programme consists of two parts which are the ‘Asia to Europe cycle’ (January-April) and the ‘Europe to Asia cycle’ (September-November). Each cycle is completed with an end-of-stay camp (PEACE Camp) which is centered on the themes of global and active citizenship education. The first PEACE Camp in Europe will be held from 15-18 April 2018 near Brussels/Belgium while the PEACE camp in Asia will be held in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia from 22-26 November 2018.
Besides serving as the end-of-stay camp for PEACE participants, the PEACE Camp will also become a platform for a training-of-trainers in the field of active global citizenship education and on the PEACE programme itself. The first PEACE Camp will involve, next to a preparatory team of six volunteers from the European partners of the project, and they will become PEACE multipliers in their national AFS organisations after the camp. One volunteer from our Asian partners was selected to become a key person in both PEACE Camps.
THE PEACE PROJECT
The PEACE project runs over two years, 2017 and 2018. PEACE stands for “Peace in Europe and Asia through global Citizenship Education”. The EFIL project is sponsored by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ programme. The goal of the project is to design the framework for a new sustainable three-month secondary school exchange programme similar to the intra-European “European Citizenship Trimester Programme” (ECTP) which EFIL has been running successfully each year since it was launched in 2009. In the PEACE programme trimester exchanges will take place between Asia and Europe, with end-of-stay camps on global citizenship in Europe (Brussels) and in Asia (Kuala Lumpur). The target group will be secondary school students between 15-18 years old. The programme will be open to all EFIL and AAI Partners.
The PEACE project participants are staff and key volunteers of 8 European AFS organisations (EFIL members) and 7 Asian AFS partners (AAI members). Throughout the two years of the EU sponsored project, they have played an important and relevant role in the development of the future PEACE programme.
Do you want to send students on the next PEACE programme? please contact us for more information: peace@afs.org