Human Rights Generation

Step one in the HRG community action is simple: Bring together your friends and map your skills.

Gather your friends and arrange a meeting, prepare an agenda for the meeting, plan a brainstorming exercise and appoint a chair person of the meeting. If you need several meetings, make sure to appoint different chair people.

Prepare the meeting well, not only concerning the content and agenda, but also the snacks and drinks.

Just make sure you have fun and follow your heart while doing it: What snacks do you and your friends like? Where do you like to meet? What do you want to talk about?

For the part of the meeting where you map your skills, make sure you have some paper and pens at your disposal.

Brainstorm answers to the following questions

1. What is that you like? Which leisure time activities?
2. What are your unique skills?
3. What would you like to be able to do?
4. What is your dream of accomplishing?
5. What are you afraid of?

Be sure to encourage each other to talk about skills and dreams. It’s important to practice that.

The whole point is that you get to know yourself and your friends. In doing so, you realise what you have in common and how you could use that common skill, interest or dream to make the world a little better.

Make sure you have an open discussion about these things and put down everything on a piece of paper.

We look forward to welcoming you to the Human Rights Generation! Check out other community actions under HRG, from many different places.

The next step is to analyse the problem you and your friends want to solve.

You can do the analysis in a separate meeting or if you have time in the same one, from above.

The important questions to discuss

1. What is it you and your friends most care about in your community? 
2. What is not working in your community that you’d love to work our much better?

Make sure you have an open discussion about these things and put down everything on a piece of paper.

Ready, set, go

Once you have formed your team and mapped your skills and dreams, you have accomplished one part of the preparation. The other part is the problem analysis.

Now that you have both, put them next to each other and analyse both sheets of paper.

The question to discuss

1. Which problem/ challenge in our community do we as a group most strongly care about?
2. How can we use our skills, dreams and characteristics to tackle that problem and make change happen?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly – meaning all the countries of the world – on December 10, 1948 in Paris.

You can find it here and study it. You can also print it out for the next HRG meeting with your friends.

The UDHR is an awesome tool to anchor your HRG project in the Human Rights, to boost your confidence about the fact that you deserve to make the change happen that you and your friends have envisioned. Most young people don’t know the UDHR so well and never realise that it provides rights and duties that young people can and should make use of.

Ask yourself and discuss:

Is our problem covered by the UDHR?

How can we use the UDHR to boost our HRG campaign idea?

We have prepared awesome help for you – the All Rights booklet, to answer those questions. We have analysed the UDHR and other Human Rights documents, like the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and provide you with more details and food for thought.

Your community action can be whatever – whatever you like, fits into the community and is possible to implement.

All you need is a big dream and a good plan.

Be sure to use your creative powers and bring art to the public space of your community. HRG is about combining a social cause with art and creativity that all young people do have inside themselves.

Do you have all the answers to the questions above? Then you are good to go to rock the show…

1. Arrange your event
2. Invite people and the media to the event
3. Announce the event
4. Prepare material for people, so that they can learn more about your cause and why you do what you
5. Enjoy
6. Have fun

This is what other young people did, together. As you can see, creativity and ideas were flowing, but they were also sharp in planning and implementation.

Forming a team is an art. Forming a good team is almost magic. For Human Rights Generation to be fun and impactful, you need to make sure you have a great group of people around you – and all skills and talents are needed:

• The visionary
• The leader
• The organiser
• The administrator
• The filmmaker
• The PR-person

It’s fun try these roles and experiment. No one person needs to do one thing, fill only one role all the time. But be sure to have every role covered.

Film-making and story telling is crucial for HRG.

You have a social issue you care about deeply. And you have skills and interests that put you in position to make change happen – through Human Rights Generation. Now you need to make sure your artful community action is filmed and documented, so that the impact of the event (you have planned so meticulously) is prolonged and multiplied.

Film-making and story telling are great tools and really fun ways of advocating for change. And the good thing is that all smart phones allow you to make good movies today. Technology is not a limitation.

Human Rights Generation is on YouTube, where you can find all the movies that other young stars have made.