Full reports, overview of workshops, background information etc. is available at the IHEYO web site: www.iheyo.org. This article gives a brief outline of the conference.
In 2005, IHEYO organised its fourth annual international humanist youth conference parallel to the IHEU World Congress. Actually, the tradition of this event started at the previous IHEU World Congress in 2002! This year, it was co-organised with La Ligue de l’Enseignement and with a focus on interculturalism and young active citizenship. It took place from 9 to 14 July in Paris. Around 50 young humanists and human rights activists gathered for a week of intense collaboration, inspiration and fun.
Based on IHEYO’s experiences of previous conferences, this event was a mix of cultural activities, practical training, workshops and interesting in-depth debate. This conference required even more active involvement of the participants and it was a much longer conference. The first few days focussed on giving a theoretical background to the theme, so that participants could draw up their project proposal in the last days of the conference
The conference was mainly financed through funding from the Council of Europe. The conference involved participants coming from European countries, but there were also some participants from the other continents. Participants came from: Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and the US — in total, 18 different countries.
The conference resulted in an inspiring exchange and some good, newly developed projects that we can carry out. These were developed by the participants, who divided into groups. The following projects were developed:
1) Training of humanist trainers
2) Website project to redesign and mantain the IHEYO site
3) Intercultural Arts Camp
4) Camp for promoting interculturalism
5) Discovering Education through Critical Thinking
6) Flying Humanists
7) Partnership between East African and Western young humanists
Several groups informed us that they were very keen to follow up these projects.
You can find the full conference report with a full overview of the developed project, presentations of speakers and workshopdescriptions at the IHEYO site: www.iheyo.org.