✍️ This includes strong and purpose-driven youth organisations and their associations.
🙏 We won’t go into detail at this stage, but the Georgian government, the current administration, is absolutely opposed to civil society and any form of cooperation in the form of grants, which would promote development and international cooperation within a civil society framework focused on democracy, humanity and European values.
🔵 Even before the drastic amendments to the law (currently approved at second reading), together with our Georgian friends, true patriots of their country, as part of the LAPAS project, we were able to create a card game about democracy and the UN’s goals – in Latvian, English and Georgian, thereby providing an opportunity to demonstrate, discuss and teach democracy in an informal setting, using non-formal education methods. Unfortunately, given the current government’s actions, this form of cooperation may not be possible in the future.
📢 The game is designed to encourage discussion in groups of 2 to … people; after reading a question, each participant shares their thoughts, vision and understanding of it. It fosters a relaxed conversation where there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, but rather encourages a high-quality dialogue in which one person speaks whilst the others listen, and vice versa. The game has been trialled in both Georgia and Latvia, and early users have rated it very positively and found it successful.
💡 It is symbolic that, meeting with our partners in Georgia for the second time in two months, this is taking place at the Latvian Embassy in Georgia, hosted by Ambassador Edīte Medne, who gave us a very warm welcome and expressed her delight at the successful collaboration and the outcome achieved. We would like to express our gratitude for this opportunity and the space provided. We believe that cooperation between non-governmental organisations from different countries, particularly in the field of youth, is especially important for strengthening leaders and fostering their engagement.
🫡 “Laiks Jauniešiem” and its partners have agreed to continue their cooperation as far as possible. It will not, in fact, be possible to secure grant funding for civil society cooperation with Georgia; at present, cooperation through Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps may be the only viable financial framework for collaboration that will not pose a risk to our Georgian partners. We will continue our cooperation despite this situation, by strengthening remote communication, digital activities and promoting the ‘peer-to-peer’ principle.
“This publication was co-funded by the European Union. The association ‘Laiks Jauniešiem’ is solely responsible for its content, which does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.”
@followersYouth AffairsYouth International Programmes AgencyMinistry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of LatviaLatvian Platform for Development Cooperation – LAPASEurodesk Latvia