Active Citizenship — Romania

Active citizenship was an amazing project hosted by Be You in Târgoviste, Romania. In total 34 people from Romania, Macedonia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Portugal, Matlta and Czech Republic arrived during the whole day and night to a beautiful hotel. Next day, we met the others and started forming relationships. Our trainers Ilona and Alexandru prepared some team building games, introduced us to the topic of Active citizenship and managed to remember all of our names in a few minutes.

In the following days a lot of debates took place. We were discussing political situation in our countries, voting turnout, principles of democracy and many more. Every single person participated in the discussion and the opinions said were really interesting. Even though we all had different points of view on various topics, in the end we shared a common idea.

One of the most entertaining activity was a simulation of municipal voting. We were divided into political parties and our task was to push our ideas to the citizens group which was in charge of voting. Some parties wanted to build a skatepark for young people, others were strongly against it and the Populist party was just trying to gain popularity. It ended up being both serious and funny at the same time. (In the final voting skatepark was denied.)

In the second part of our project, we talked more about voluntary activities and NGOs, proposing our own ideas to help the society in our respective countries. On the last day, every national group proposed a Erasmus+ project about youth problems, almost ready to apply for a grant.

During the week and half, all of us created an amazing group of people, willing to attend the sessions, presenting our opinions and having time in the free time. We saw a little bit from the history of Târgoviste as a former capital, we tasted he Romanian cuisine (chicken meat and polenta twice a day) and enjoyed every single moment of the training course.