Romania: Mihaela Frunzeti, Executive Director of Alter Eco

At the end of February forty young people from 10 countries created multemedia campaign materials to fight discrimination and promote the EU's Year for intercultural dialogue. The campaign will be aired in Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Portugal, Belgium, Romania, Germany and Italy for three months in the ten different languages. Mihaela Frunzeti- Executive Director of the Youth Association Alter Eco Communicating through media, tells us why this youth initiative was so successful.

How did you live the creation of the campaign from inside as participant?
I really liked the idea of three different workshops each one with a concrete objective, in the audio one the task was creating a radio jingle, in the video one – a small spot and in the photo one to create a poster for a city light. It was interesting to see how people where motivated to get a good result. The participants felt more creative and came out with more materials over the planned one. For example we also got few postcards from the photo workshops and a CD with music containing a jam session with 13 songs from the audio team and a 20 minutes movie from the video workshop.

Also the creation of the campaign was itself an example of tolerance inside the working groups since they needed to deal with several issues related to their cultural understanding. The project participants had the possibility to live in place all the concepts that they were discussing since the project took part in Serbia during the proclamation of Kosovo Independence while in the group where participants from Albania, from Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia and also EU countries that recognized the Kosovo Independence and other that did not. So by chance the group became a smaller scale representation of what was going on in international political and social landscape.

Could you tell us what was the moment that most influenced you?
It was interesting to see how countries divided by wars were working together and cooperating, even singing in the same language. The project allowed us to get a better understanding of the situation in Balkans after wars and under the recent events. It was also interesting to compare the different concepts of Active Citizenships and Tolerance and analyze the situation on these topics in each of the participant?s countries.

How did the local community from Sabac react to the public presentation of the Campaign?
The public presentation of the campaign was postponed due to the situation and uncertain moments were lived by participants while expected to see the citizen?s reaction on the recent events and maybe in worst case need to leave the country under the possibility of conflicts and attacks.

Finally the event was cancelled for respect and in order to avoid possible incidents, but organizers together with participants decided to change the program and instead of presentation to have an open cultural exhibition where all people from Sabac could came to see a live concert and exposition of our workshops, pictures, art pieces based on the topics and to use it as a experimental space of tolerance and interaction.

To read more:
Serbia: Youth-led citizenship campaign fights discrimination