LocalDerad

Despite numerous government programs to prevent extremism and hate crime since 2000, practitioners working on the ground in various areas of youth work (youth facilities, street social work, school social work, juvenile justice, etc.) often feel that they do not know what to do when confronted with this phenomenon. This is because government programs have often been too pedagogical, cognitive, awareness-oriented and mainly focused on “multipliers” - often quite disconnected from the actual needs of practitioners and hardly ever directly targeting the vulnerable target groups.

The LocalDerad training developed by Cultures Interactive was designed to fill this gap and support local youth workers both in rural areas with a high affinity for right-wing extremism and in inner-city neighborhoods with ultra-nationalist hate cultures. In both areas, ordinary young people are also involved in the work with young people at risk. The LocalDerad approach was piloted in collaboration with a panel of practitioners and researchers and drew on Cultures Interactive's previous pilot project work and collaboration in three RAN working groups. LocalDerad was awarded the Phineo Seal of Effectiveness after passing a rigorous four-stage assessment process by Phineo for the work of good practice NGOs.

The LocalDerad training combined methods of prevention and intervention. In particular, LocalDerad provided practical tools for situational analysis, local assessment, self-evaluation, observation and narrative interviewing; it trained situational conflict transformation techniques with radicalized youth, targeted role-playing, hate crime prevention exercises, included diversity and anti-bias training as well as local monitoring, awareness raising and diversity promotion strategies. In addition, as part of the LocalDerad training, specific action plans were developed for all practitioners in their areas and coaching sessions were held with them.

This training content was grouped into two-day modules that focused on the following: (1) Assessing and proactively dealing with incidents of extremism, hate crime and dehumanizing prejudice; (2) Democracy training and networking - systemic youth work with community actors; (3) the Fair Skills approach to youth cultural peer-led training; (4) Doing gender in hot-spot areas - masculinity and femininity in youth at risk of radicalization and hate cultures; (5) Group-based hostility/hate within youth cultures - intervention, signposts, referral pathways and the participants' action plans and coaching outcomes.

In addition to this ten-day training course, Cultures Interactive developed a shorter, two- to four-day training course for international transfer, which conveyed the basic findings of the intervention plan and encouraged practitioners to apply the approaches in their own work context. This transfer was tested and implemented as part of the European Fair Skills project with partners in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.