You can see, but do you understand?

25-31 October

Berlin, Germany

"You can see, but do you understand?"

Acive is going to do something that we have not done before! Next seminar will be organised in cooperation with visually impaired and blind people - even the application and program was written in cooperation. But why?

Quite often people do not know how to behave with disabled people, as they have no experience before. In most of the European countires, lack of experience and knowledge is the result of certain social systems that bring togehter the people with same disability and quite often these people do not feel confortable to leave this group to be randomly also a part of an average social group of young people. Additionaly, the prejudices are leading to the exclusion, because if a young person do not know how do behave while being in a same group with a disabled person, young people start avoiding this kind of situations. By gaining knowledge and personal experience on the topic of disability in today’s society, or moreover, by making friends with disabled people and vise versa, the prejudices will be decreased and there will be less cases social exclusion of some groups of young people.

Or should I just quote my blind friend...

Me: "Do you think, that you would change anything in your life, if you could see"

My friend: "Actually there's no difference, if I see or not. But it's needed to break the stereotypes personally for every single person - to represent myself as a totally normal person, who has a lot of different qualities and who also, by the way is blind - and to meet with all the people, I do not have time and energy for that.

Want to be in a PREP TEAM?

In the preparation team for the seminar, there will be 6 persons, 3 visually impaired persons and 3 persons from Active member organisations. The first preparation team member has been already chosen, Jürgen from Estonia, who has been a great help while writing the application and finding other cooperative organisations.

If you want to join Jürgen in the prep team, send a motivation letter to office@activeeurope.org

Being in preparation team means following:

• participating a 3-days prep team meeting in September in Sweden
• organising a very specail seminar, opportunity to bring new ideas and to create an unforgettable week for participants
• developing a program, organising the travel and accomodation for participants
• during the seminar being resposible for your tasks and being responsible for the general success of the seminar
• all the travel, accomodation and food costs for prep team are covered 100%

Deadline for motivation letters is the 31th of May

And here's the greeting by Jürgen:)