CEE Prevent Net

In light of increasing levels of intolerance, discrimination and group hatred in Europe, the CEE Prevent Net project aimed at safeguarding young people by strengthening their resilience toward these phenomena and their skills to contribute to a peaceful and democratic society. Building on the previous project European Fair Skills, CEE Prevent Net focused on Central and Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany, since these regions share common socio-historic experiences, structural conditions and current challenges.

Supporting social and youth workers in professionally adressing group hatred

The project’s main objectives were fostering the capacity of practitioners from social/youth work and non-formal education to deal with intolerance, group hatred and violence among young people; creating a platform for multi-agency cooperation in the project countries and across the CEE region; mustering support from stakeholders and policy-makers beyond political partisanship and societal cleavages; and raising awareness for CEE issues and approaches in European and international prevention networks, where this region is still under-represented.

The project’s activities included a transfer of good practices in an international summer school, peer coaching and youth workshops in each of the project countries as well as the publication of a “Compendium of Good Practices”. Furthermore, CEE Prevent organized “Prevent Seminars” that provided practitioners and other stakeholders in prevention work with tested strategies for how to professionally address intolerance, discrimination and group hatred in the local context; two meetings of a multi-agency roundtable in each country to facilitate dialogue between practitioners, stakeholders and policy-makers in each project region; as well as advocacy activities to productively involve partners from across the political sphere in the project activities and the development of prevention work on the local and national level.