Through CESE’s Small Projects Programme, FOJUPE runs training and constructs communications plan focused on young people in Pernambuco
The Youth Forum of Pernambuco (Fórum de Juventudes de Pernambuco: FOJUPE) received support from CESE’s Small Projects Programme to strengthen activities for Young People’s August and invest in drafting a communications plan focused on digital rights and the development of activities to mobilize support. The project “Young People and Digital Rights: Training and Practice to Mobilize Support” included training sessions for 20 young people from the state of Pernambuco in how to use digital media, and produce visual and audio-visual content. The initiative also involved the production of a mini-documentary, recording the entire Young People for Democracy Cultural Festival, held on 24 September 2022.
FOJUPE brings young people together around collective organization and support mobilization to guarantee their rights, and designed the project to include a strategy to provide visibility for activities run by young people’s collectives within the territories of the state’s four macro-regions: Sertão, Agreste, Zona da Mata and the Metropolitan Region. FOJUPE is composed of rural and urban young people, young quilombolas and indigenous people, anti-prohibitionists (against the prohibition of drugs) and the LGBTQIA+ population, representatives of more than 50 collectives/groups/youth organizations and other groups that support young people. This diversity of groups has helped to promote an understanding of the plurality of agendas, as well as recognition of the diversity of young people’s expression.
TRAINING – the project’s aim is to strengthen communications in networks, collectives and youth movements by constructing a communications plan from the perspective of good quality support mobilization in the municipalities/states and in the regions covered by the forum. One highlight is hybrid format training run in partnership with the House of Women from the Northeast (Casa da Mulher do Nordeste: CMN) to teach young people how to produce digital content that dialogues with the banners of their struggles and allows them to engage more young people in the fight for democracy and good living. According to the CMN’s Social Educator, Anabelly Brederodes, “In resuming democratic pathways, the young people’s festival has maximized the power of young people in their territories. They have discussed the importance of democracy, and of social and political rights in their lives via training in communications and activities, in order to ensure that everyone can learn, collectively, about the language of social media, and have an impact on and influence more young people in their communities.”
The course involved training in social and digital media, using popular education methodologies, prioritizing the exchange of experiences and the collective construction of knowledge, aimed at the production of the forum’s Communications Plan. Every activity involved an invitation to participate in the construction of the plan, sent to the diverse movements, organizations and collectives that constitute FOJUPE. Plenaries and collective assemblies also contributed to Young People’s August, when the programme is dedicated to discussing agendas of interest to young people.
The educator described how “the ongoing project was able to connect young indigenous people, quilombolas and residents of city peripheries.” Mobilization and training activities were carried out, as well as one-off initiatives to monitor public policies. Running the Young People for Democracy Festival was part of the FOJUPE communications and mobilization agenda, and took place on 24 September in the Praça de Maria Amazonas in Camaragibe, with local coordination from the Occupy the Square Collective (Coletivo Ocupe a Praça). The event represented a political and cultural act in defence of the rights of young people and for full democracy and the rule of law.
Another project activity was a mini-documentary about the Young People for Democracy Festival, a piece that recorded the words of event participants and raised ideas about the struggles of different youth sectors. According to Juliana Ribeiro, journalist at the NGO Technical Team of Advice, Research and Social Action (Equipe Técnica de Assessoria, Pesquisa e Ação Social: ETAPAS) “in order to produce the documentary about the Young People for Democracy Festival, we collectively constructed a script with FOJUPE’s collegiate board and connected with a young audio-visual producer from Recife’s city periphery, who had already been part of the collective.”
About the Forum – the Youth Forum of Pernambuco (Fórum de Juventudes de Pernambuco: FOJUPE) is an arena for membership, managed by and for young people from Pernambuco. It was established in 2010, in order to increase understanding of the socio-political conditions of young people in Pernambuco, presenting itself as an arena for examination, training and dialogue, where young people can create and put forward agendas of dispute to formulate and propose public policy activities that meet the needs of young people in their most diverse territories and specificities.
A range of organizations that work with young people and Human Rights also participate in the forum as supporters and technical advisors, these include: Diaconia; ETAPAS; the Federation of Bodies for Social and Educational Work (Federação de Órgãos para Assistência Social e Educacional: FASE); World Vision/Youth Monitoring of Public Policies (Monitoramento Jovem de Políticas Públicas: MJPOP); Sabiá Centre (Centro Sabiá); the CMN, and others that strengthen this coalition.
CESE supported training activities aimed at communications and mobilizing support, as well as communication pieces, such as the documentary, which are necessary to maintain a record of the meeting. According to the educator, “partnership with CESE came to strengthen communications, such as a strategy to coordinate and raise the profile of the agendas of young people in Pernambuco. It helped us to think about the creative power of young leaders and to raise funds to strengthen young people’s rights.”