IYNF supports a transnational youth initiative “Stream for Change” implemented by several groups in Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Greece and Canary Islands. The project last since March till Septemeber and involves making fun street actions to raise the attention of the public about the issues that youth in Europe cares about. Read a description of the project, provided by the participants.

Although coming from very different backgrounds, the participants of the project have similar concerns and ideas and we are all, in this way or another, trying to engage our creativity, passion and resources into putting attention, thoughts and minds into the topics we find important.  We thought it would be amazing if we could engage together in a project that would allow us to share ideas and inspirations. Moreover, we would like our voices, thoughts and concerns to be heard by more people and we decided to design a project that would allow young, active people have their voices heard and their ideas visible.

A more concrete idea for the project was born from a discussion on a relation of young people with media and the perception of media in general. There were 3 key concerns that we have identified:
1) A lot of issues concerning young people are discussed without consulting with them. Local governments, institutions, media and businesses create laws, projects and products for young people without young people. Most of the media content is created by people who often do not relate to problems and points of view of youth and the voice of young people is often disregarded. It is difficult for young people to have their voices heard.
2) An issue related to the one outlined above is the image of youth in the media. Since it seems that bad news and tragic stories are easier to market, it is much more likely that one will find negative stories about young people in the media. Young people are often presented in news as restless, up to no good or spoiled consumerist without much purpose in life or much interest for building a better world around them. The events such as riots in London in August 2011 don’t contribute to changing this image of youth.
3) What is connected to the above issue is that the media is full of grim news in general. A young citizen of Europe is surrounded by news of climate change, economic crises, unemployment, upcoming crashes of financial systems, wars and famine in the world, atomic threats, terrorism… This is hardly the brightest setting for a young person that has to make important choices about their future and is in progress of growing up and having to face the world.

We have decided to respond to the above-listed issues by “creating good news” and finding ways to share and report them. We would like the young people that are to be involved in this project to be able to meet together in order to plan a set of actions designed to attract the attention of people in their communities to the issues that are important to them in original, fun, amusing, smile-causing, thought-provoking ways. The people involved in this youth initiative will agree on the set of topics to be addressed (related to environmental and social justice) and ways to address them (flash mobs, impromptu amateur art performances, stickering campaigns – our imagination will be the only limit here). We will launch our campaigns simultaneously in different countries and then we will record and share the results. We, as active and concerned young people will use our creativity to create good news, then we will record them ourselves on videos, pictures and in form of articles and report the results on an internet platform. We will use the variety of new media to promote our platform so we will share the results not only among ourselves but in general with other young people and the greater public. We will aim to improve the image of young people while employing our creativity and enterpreunial capacity. We will raise awareness regarding the issues that are close to our hearts and we will show everyone around us that it is up to all of us to make the good change we want to see in the society.

The first meeting of the international groups have happened in March in Prague. You can check out the pictures of the meeting and the resulting street action here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.345611572141128.71617.152212478147706&type=3