Intercultural Dialogue Day 2015: Active Global Citizenship
Intercultural Dialogue Day is just around the corner
Intercultural Dialogue Day (IDD) is the day when AFS gives particular space to the initiative and creativity of volunteers, to reach audiences beyond exchange students and host families and share intercultural learning content in their local communities. The project was initiated by the European Federation for Intercultural Learning (EFIL), the umbrella organization for AFS in Europe, in 2008 — and ever since has been celebrated by local AFS volunteers all over Europe on the last Thursday in September.
The success of the initiative triggered the interest of AFS organizations outside Europe and starting this year, volunteers from AFS organizations around the world are encouraged to create projects and initiatives to celebrate IDD globally.
This year’s theme for IDD is Active Global Citizenship. In order to organize and support IDD events, AFS organizations can use materials produced during the ACTIVE project, coordinated by EFIL. The project aims at introducing active citizenship content in AFS orientations and other activities, as described in this inception video:
More materials will be launched at the annual EFIL Volunteer Summer Summit in August, including the AFS Active Citizens video showing stories of AFSers who define themselves as active citizens, and a Manual of Activities on Active Citizenship.
#afsactivecitizens and #EFILAFS will be used to tag social media posts related to IDD this year and all participating AFS volunteers and organizations are encouraged to join the conversation. All tweets and pictures with these hashtags will appear in a special section of the website activecitizens.org
Organizers are also encouraged to submit their IDD events to the Best IDD Photo & Video contest! This special contest is organized under two main categories Best IDD Video and Best IDD Photo through the Intercultural Dialogue Day Facebook page and will run from Thursday 24 September until Thursday 8 October. The winning photo and video will be the ones with most “likes” from the global AFS community and winners in each category will be awarded a free registration to the EFIL Volunteer Summer Summit in 2016, one of AFS network’s largest annual volunteer gatherings.
For inspiration and to see examples of IDD events from the past years, please have a look at the EFIL website, and watch the video resulting from IDD in 2014.
Written by Izabela Jurczik-Arnold, Senior Training and Project Coordinator, European Federation for Intercultural Learning (EFIL)
