2025 has been a busy and fruitful year for the EUR(H)OPE project!

In February we released the final version of our Self-Telling Kit, a guide that provides the bases and main instruments of self-narrative and narrative journalism, and helps both young people and youth workers learn to tell their own stories effectively and professionally, as well as empowering other young people to do so. In addition to providing a theoretical base for these skills, the Self-Telling Kit also provides practical steps and activities for putting the theory into practice, including 3 sample workshops of differing formats and durations. The Self-Telling Kit is currently available as a free download in both PDF and e-book formats, with translations in English, Spanish, Albanian, Arabic, and Italian. To download the Self-Telling Kit and begin using its contents, visit our website today!

In May, EUR(H)OPE project partners also had the chance to meet in-person at a coordination meeting in Tiznit, Morocco (29-30 May), which allowed us to plan the second year of our project’s activities and organize final details for the activities planned in June and July, a series of Local Workshops and a Youth Exchange in Barcelona. This meeting was particularly important for us, as it was the first time we have seen our colleagues from Morocco’s Friends Foundation in-person due to issues with obtaining visas for their participation in the project’s partner meetings and mobility activities. We are grateful to MFF for their hospitality and look forward to the next year of cooperation with all our project partners!

This summer we have also been busy carrying out two important activities: a series of Local Workshops in each partner country to train young adults in the methodologies of self-narrative and narrative journalism and a Youth Exchange in Barcelona.

From late May through June, each project partner held 2-3 days of Local Workshops with youth participants aged 18-30 in their local areas. These workshops gave participants an intensive introduction to self-narrative and narrative storytelling, sharing materials from our Self-Telling Kit and developing further skills in conducting a professional interview, identifying and developing our own personal stories, and connecting these personal stories to our wider contexts and communities. The workshops featured the collaboration of several youth workers who took part in our previous Training Course in Tirana, Albania (December 2024) and other external trainers, who shared both their experiences from the Training Course and their unique skills and perspectives to help youth participants develop their knowledge of storytelling, journalism, and photographic techniques, in addition to deepening their understanding of the Self-Telling process. These workshops reached a total of 40 participants of varied ages and backgrounds, and 5 participants from each country were selected to travel to Barcelona and take part in the intensive Youth Exchange.

After an online Kickoff Meeting to introduce ourselves and help the participants get to know one another, CEPS received the 20 young adults from the 4 partner countries for a week-long, intensive Youth Exchange, held from 7-11 July at #plantauno (l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona). This week provided in-depth training on the creation of self-narratives and audiovisual production, as well as ample opportunities for the participants to share their experiences and engage in valuable cultural exchange with young people from countries and cultures different from their own. Participants learned new skills in personal and collective narrative techniques, conscious communication, sound design, audiovisual techniques, and recording sound and visuals, as well as developing new soft skills in intercultural communication, knowledge exchange, and the management of intercultural group dynamics, among others. Afterward, they put all of these skills into practice in a guided process of creating, producing, editing, and presenting their own audiovisual/ journalistic outputs in 4 intercultural groups.

You can view the 4 audiovisual pieces created during the Youth Exchange in full at the following YouTube links:

We are proud of all the activities carried out thus far this year, and look forward to the next steps of the project: a series of Local Policy Labs this fall 2025 and local Final Conferences in each partner city in winter 2026!