Empowering YOUth to build MONITORial communities against corruption

Unipi Team Leader: Alberto Vannucci, Department of Political Sciences 

Background
The motivation behind the project started from the recognition of missing coordinated efforts to promote anti-corruption in education programmes targeting youth, and poor cooperation between European CSOs in engaging youth in anti-corruption projects, making anti-corruption unattractive.

The project partners felt the urgency to promote integrity and anti-corruption as founding values of the EU among young people and observed the need of bringing together thematic (anti-corruption) and methodological (youth work) expertise to produce an effective method. The goal was to outdo the traditional approach focused on the repressive aspects of the phenomenon, and instead being designed for a specific young audience, adaptable to different country contexts and aimed at engaging and empowering young people on these issues with a non-formal approach - restoring a sense of trust in society and the state.

In addition, there was the will to introduce to a young audience and develop a new approach towards the topic of monitoring democracies and monitoring communities, seen as a community tool to protect the common good. All these observations together led the partnership towards the You Monitor project.

Objectives
The specific objective of You Monitor was to develop an innovative, cross-sectorial and non-formal educational method (the You Monitor toolkit), produced together by partners and usable by youth
workers to engage and empower young people in civic anti-corruption (promoting a culture of integrity and developing monitorial communities).
By this objective, the project wanted to meet the Erasmus+ goals to support capacity building of youth workers and foster quality improvements in youth work, developing innovative non-formal educational methods and bringing together organisations in the youth and anti-corruption fields. Consistently with the EU Youth Strategy 2019-2027, the project fostered citizenship competencies and created opportunities for young people to participate in public life in policy areas affecting their lives, with an innovative form of democratic participation aimed to tackle corruption with a bottom-up approach.
The project responded also to the provisions of UNCAC for CSOs to promote anti-corruption education programmes and public participation in decision-making processes.

Implementation
During the project all activities foreseen were implemented:
- 3 transnational project meetings with the project staff, in order to set the base for a good common understanding and to coordinate and monitor the evolution of the project
- a continuous exchange between partners and extensive documentation work, to ensure fruitful cooperation and effective project management, planning, evaluation and follow-up
- more than 400 working days to produce, correct, proofread, translate and graphically render the final project products (which together form the You Monitor Toolkit)
- 2 international training sessions to test and improve the contents of the toolkit with a wide group of external youth workers, coming from the different project countries
- 3 multiplier events in the three capital cities of the project
- at least 23 dissemination events and numerous coordinated communication’s actions to promote and disseminate the toolkit to the widest possible audience, in first place youth workers but also other relevant stakeholders

Results
You Monitor partners produced non-formal education resources for youth workers to engage young people on anti-corruption. These resources include simplified theory, hints for guided reflection, active learning activities, workshop activities and conclude with a role-play game. The narrative starts with a reflection on how to learn “self-monitoring” about phenomena such as power, delegated power, conflict of interest and abuse of power - that are common for all youth in daily life, but usually are not framed in this way. This reflection leads to the understanding of the culture of integrity. Building on this, the project invites the participants to take a step further and have a look to all tools available for the “monitoring of the common good” - in particular introducing the concept of community-based monitoring - becoming anti-corruption activists.

The final project output that collects all these contents is the You Monitor Toolkit, available in 4 languages (English, French, German, Italian) in digital format and limited printed copies. The toolkit is downloadable free of charge, licensed and released under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Coordinator: mafianeindanke e.V. (Germany)

Other participants:

Association Echanges et Partenariats (France)
DeMains Libres (France)
Associazione Gruppo Abele onlus (Italy)
LIBERA - ASSOCIAZIONI, NOMI E NUMERI CONTRO LE MAFIE (Italy)
UNIVERSITA DI PISA

Start date: 01-12-2020

End date: 31-01-2023

EU Grant: 210.501 €

Project website: http://mafianeindanke.de/youmonitor/

Project results also available on Erasmus+ Platform