human rights and hate speech subjects that were to be tackled were chosen by the young people, depending on the issues most relevant to them and their local context. It was the responsibility of CEPS, within the framework of the HIT project, to provide guidance to the young people, whilst giving them freedom to explore their own ideas. The pilot training and workshop activities had as main objective to stimulate the creation of young HITs, to further their knowledge on the topic of human rights issues, and to give them technical support to express their concerns and actively combat hate speech and racism. The ultimate goal was to encourage them to see the connection that rights come with responsibilities, to uphold them, and be active citizens and defenders of our rights. The HIT pilot training sessions in Spain were designed to gradually build up the knowledge of the young people about human rights, discrimination and inclusion, and help them to design strategies to create a local HIT teams that can combat hate and racism. 38 young people (age 15 to 19 years; 20 girls, 18 boys) signed up to 7 sessions of pilot training (35 hours). The training was implemented with two groups in two different youth clubs in Barcelona. The areas (Navas and Nou Barris) are both of great cultural diversity, but also with social problems, due to high levels of unemployment. Hate speech and racism are recurring problems the young people in these areas face daily. In order to make the sessions fun for young people, the training was structured around audio-visual production. The training began with the presentation of the project, the screening of some relevant videos, and discussions about experiences the participants had. In the second session storyboards were created, which were then translated into photo-stories and videos. Throughout the training facilitators used fun activities from the HIT project evaluation framework, to gage what participants knew, how they felt about it and what to emphasize or pick up in the next sessions. The main aim of the HIT workshops was to activate young people to form HIT teams and design original material for the EU wide HIT campaign, to counteract hate speech and racism. In addition, the workshops were ‘collaborative’ because an important element was to connect young people with stakeholders, such as teachers, social media influencers, journalists, cultural managers etc. On the one hand, the stakeholders were invited as a source of inspiration for the young people, and on the other hand, they provided access to public platforms, where the young people could make their voices heard. 21 teenagers from the Quatre Cantons secondary school in Barcelona (3rd year course, 13-14 years old, 11 girls, 10 boys) spent six weeks working on the HIT journey. CEPS invited the youngsters to develop elements for the 'HIT Awareness Raising Campaign on Racism and Hate speech against Migrants', including campaign videos, posters, postcards, slogans etc. Four support sessions were organized by CEPS with a total of 8 stakeholders: Teacher and director of the school Quatre Cantons, a social media Influencer (Instagrammer: @gigialexandrav), Two journalists from the magazine “Junior Report”, an Audio-visual expert, an AV and Storytelling Expert, and Cultural Manager at “Trànsit Projectes”.
Greece During the implementation of HIT project, ‘The Smile of the Child’ implemented activities addressed to young people aged 14-19 years old with the scope of understanding and learning how to identify hate speech and how to counteract it. Some of the activities of HIT journey in Greece which could be considered as ‘Best practices’ are on the one hand the training seminars on human rights and hate speech that were held on April (15th-19th) and July of 2019 (1st-5th) with 52 participants in total (25 in Nice, Piraeus and 10