Background:
Lumen is a team of enthusiastic people of diverse ages and backgrounds that aim to change the current mindset of our little town. We mostly do it through street art, because it’s the first thing that catches the eye and may create a huge impact on several views. As well as international activities that we facilitate raise a lot of attention from the townies who are immediately interested in communicating with foreign youth. Through mPowerArt youth exchange we wanted to cover the following objectives:
➔ To empower young European people through art
➔ To raise cultural awareness within local and foreign communities
➔ To promote social inclusion and tolerance
➔ To inform young people about the Erasmus+ Programme opportunities
➔ To raise a sense of EU citizenship and motivate young people to participate more towards the development in their own communities
Outcomes:
In a full week of our art and culture exploration journey, we’ve managed to create 2 murals inside and outside of our organization, prepare the walls for the professional street artists in the central park of our town, The Island of Youth, and celebrate Erasmus Days through learning how to create murals with spray paints.
As a result, the numbers of our project are:
2 – murals created for our organization and local visibility
3 – professional street art pieces that were created in our town with full involvement of our participants
6 – European Union countries involved in the project
7 – full activity days of creating art and sharing one’s cultures
36 – the amount of young people involved in the youth exchange
Impact:
➔ Informed and empowered youth
➔ Motivation of young people to make change of the mindset inside of their local communities
➔ Young people being mobilized and inspired to create similar projects within their environments
➔ Raised sense of EU citizenship and readiness to be involved in the political and cultural change in European community
Not only did this project help us to make our town more colorful and open for intercultural dialogue, as an organization, we’ve settled as a solid team for Lumen to function all year long and create a full ambitious action plan for the next year. So, for us mPowerArt wasn’t less meaningful than for our participants who had become a real force of change and built beautiful friendships on the project. We believe that this was the most important impact from this youth exchange and we will continue doing everything that is in our responsibilities to inspire and motivate young Europeans to create meaningful art and embrace their creativity.
