20 years of Coloured Glasses at YFU Germany!
September 03, 2021 10:29
To honor the success story of Colored Glasses, an anniversary party took place at the headquarters of YFU Germany in Hamburg on September 17th. Volunteers and staff members as well as cooperation partners attended. In addition, our CEO Knut Möller and three top politicians from Hamburg participated in the event, lauding Coloured Glasses in brief greetings: Colored Glasses stands for a strong youth movement, for active volunteer commitment to enable as many young people as possible to have an intercultural learning experience.
Let’s take a brief look at the history of Coloured Glasses!
The idea behind the project: Young people who do not have the opportunity to participate in an exchange program abroad should nonetheless be able to have an intercultural learning experience - through interactive workshops for school classes and youth groups that are carried out by volunteers in a peer-to-peer approach. Over the years, Coloured Glasses has consolidated its position as provider of high school workshops in intercultural education: Since 2001 around 25,000 young people across Germany have been able to take part in about 1,900 Coloured Glasses workshops. These workshops are free of charge.
The idea for Coloured Glasses was developed in 2001 by a group of EVS (European Volunteer Service) volunteers from Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. With support from YFU, they developed the idea for Coloured Glasses and put it into practice in Denmark, Estonia and Germany. As a follow-up, individual volunteers from YFU Germany decided to start Coloured Glasses as an independent project. Workshops are now held all over Germany and close to 200 workshops a year were being held prior to school closings due to the Corona pandemic.
It all started 2001 with workshops about stereotypes & prejudice, discrimination, and culture.
Over the years, the range of topics has been expanded e.g. in 2015, the need arose to place the influx of refugees into an objective context, to which we responded with an additional workshop concept on the subject of flight and migration. Furthermore, the “Colored Glasses Manual” resulted from a standardization of workshop concepts from various EU countries in 2016. Workshops on human rights, identity and global citizenship are now part of our repertoire.
Grants for the Erasmus + program made it possible to work on projects together with other Coloured Glasses locations in Europe and to develop Colored Glasses in a variety of ways., e.g. the project CGrow (2017) made it possible to develop an international quality management framework, a scientific study about Coloured Glasses as well as conceptual work.
The corona pandemic initially presented Coloured Glasses in Germany with major challenges - how should workshops be held when schools are closed? However, our volunteers hardly hesitated before actively committing themselves to the development of concepts for online workshops.
As a result, we can now also offer Coloured Glasses workshops digitally. Furthermore, the concept was again adapted to the current needs of target groups. Online workshops have been developed for the topics of non-violent online communication, hate speech and forms of discrimination.
Colored Glasses is alive and always evolving. We want to celebrate its special success story together with everyone from Coloured Glasses around the world! Join our digital anniversary event (in English) on Saturday, 2nd October from 2:30 p.m. to approx. 5:00 p.m. CEST: Please register by 30th September: Registration You will receive the access link before the event.
Colored Glasses is alive and ever evolving. We want to celebrate its special success story together with everyone from Coloured Glasses around the world! Join our digital anniversary event (in English) on Saturday, 2nd October from 2:30 p.m. to approx. 5:00 p.m. CEST: Please register by 30th September: Registration You will receive the access link a few days before the event.
