Raising and awareness in Darlington and Tees Valley welcomed 29 people from across Europe to a week long seminar to create strategies that will support young people who are bullied. from (th to 17th april the course aimed to bring young people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds together in order to develop a collaborative and shared approach to combat bullying. Countries taking part are Italy, Macedonia, Moldova, Spain, Ukraine and the UK.
RAID-TV is a locally based charity run entirely by volunteers and works with young people on issues around sexual health and relationships. They recently hosted a trip to the UK by a group of young people from their partner school in Swaziland. Funding for this course is coming from the European Union's ERASMUS+ programme.
Young people from Darlington's Stagecoach group joined the course for a day to work with participants using workshop and role play to explore the issues around bullying and how to develop peer education in their work.
Course organiser Sue Davison says, "We passionately believe that real change should happen for young people as a result of this seminar and therefore participants were involved in creating strategies to implement within their own work involving young people. Using the work produced during the week we will be able to construct a Bullying Strategy that we hope will be adopted across the European Union.
Young people were involved in the direct delivery of workshops and activities, with participants having the opportunity to interact with all throughout, enabling the development of what we aim will be sustainable strategies addressing the multitude of issues surrounding bullying.
Report by Sue Davison.