The partners of the Grassroots project meet in Catalunya for the 2nd steering team meeting

The partners of the Grassroots project meet in Catalunya for the 2nd steering team meeting

From the 1 st until the 8 th of February the partners involved in the KA2 Grassroots Change project participated in the 2nd Steering Team Meeting and Production Lab in Barcelona

SCI Catalunya hosted the coordinators of the partners’ Grassroots organizations in Barcelona to go through the whole project making the evaluation of all the activities and to finalize the production of the project tools and documents on volunteer exchanges. It was useful to have time to list the materials that the participants of the several activities created: Gender toolkit with an intercultural perspective; guidelines about climate; an infographic on the role of an LTV mentor; online webinar on the topic of decolonization.

At the same time, the partners involved participated in the first steps of the creation of a MOOC (massive open online course) about exchanges between Europe and Africa (both sides). The main objective of this course will be to prepare and give some points of reflection to those volunteers who want to go from Europe to Africa or from Africa to Europe for a volunteering experience. This Mooc does not pretend to give volunteers all the answers to their questions before living for a new challenging adventure, but yes it wants to try to open their mind and make them think about really important concepts like, voluntourism, white savior mentality, cultural shock, expectations, prejudices, stereotypes, and many more.

It was really important for all the partners to meet in-person and have the opportunity to talk all together about the impact of the project and future activities to further strengthen relations and trust between African and European countries.

The program of the meeting foreseen 3 days of evaluation and 3 days of production of the Mooc. The participants had also the chance to collaborate with another international group that was working on an Erasmus+ InMedia project in Barcelona: within this InMedia project, the participants of Grassroots had the opportunity to record some videos on the topic of interculturality, motivation and preparation before going for a volunteering experience, cultural shock, etc.