The Amalipe Center hosted the fifth webinar for student mentors

On February 15 from 2 p.m. the fifth training in a series of webinars organized by the Amalipe Center was held as part of the Leadership Program for Capacity Development of Mentoring Students. This initiative is part of the project “Every student will be a winner-3”, funded by the Trust for Social Achievement Foundation.

The first surprise for our student mentors were the winners of the British Embassy “Ambassador for a Day” competition – Vanessa Filipova, Nikol Petrova, Anna Komandareva, Anastasia Trenovska and Edge Ahmed, who presented their expectations from our joint work through extremely interesting drawings.

One of the drawings highlights the interaction between young people, the right to vote and the opportunity to express their opinions freely.

In the webinar on “Aggression – a source of conflict. How to deal with a difficult situation. Hate speech “, more than 60 participants, representatives of schools from the network, took part.
The main idea and goal of this training module was to lay the foundations for building sensitivity to civically important topics for young people – fostering tolerance towards diversity, increasing knowledge of hate speech and behavior in the Internet, incl. social networks.

Yonka Danova and Tanya Hristova, who are members of the team of Amalipe Center, gave the young people interactive presentations that introduced them to the types of conflicts that arise in educational institutions, as well as the forms of expressing hate speech in the media and everyday life.

During an open discussion, participants shared life experiences, presenting personal examples of situations in which they were a party to the conflict.

A special guest and role model of the student mentors in this webinar was the actress Natalia Tsekova, who shared her life path from the Roma neighborhood to the big stage.
With interest and excitement, the young people asked questions and eagerly awaited Natalia’s emotional answers.

During the second part of the webinar, Ambassador Vanessa Filipova introduced the students to the mentors with the risks of the network and the consequences of Hate Comments, which contain hate speech.

It is a tradition for each webinar of the Leadership Capacity Development Program to work in small groups under the mentorship of team leaders. In this training module, their task was to discuss a case that presents a particular conflict in school and to present their arguments and possible actions to resolve it.

Surprisingly for us, each of the small groups gave the ambassadors, who were also part of the groups, the opportunity to present the group work by complementing each other. We appreciate this continuity on the part of the student mentors, because it is indicative of a tolerant attitude and positive relationships.

We continue to develop the capacity of our student mentors and believe that educated children are the right path to successful integration!