Armenian Progressive Youth NGO Challenge 2 Change: Gender Perspectives in Europe | Page 2

Training Course “Challenge 2 Change: Gender Perspectives in Europe” The Organizers Armenian Progressive Youth (Armenia) is a non-profit, non-political youth organization aiming to support, inspire and engage young people from Armenia and all over the world to develop their social leadership skills, to take their civic responsibility and to act as change-makers. Through different projects, initiatives and non-formal education tools we help young people to succeed, ensuring that they develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes and competences to fit to the modern world. We believe that progressive, educated, skillful, open-minded and engaged young people possess all the power to become actors of change in Armenia and beyond because youth is not the future but the present! APY actively advocates and works for gender equality in Armenia and in the whole region. In 21st century’s Armenian women still experience domestic violence which takes a form of psychological, physical and sexual abuse. This is coupled with widespread gender based selective abortions. At the same, time in APY we are concerned that the word “gender” becomes an adjective to describe anything perverted and sinful, anything aimed to undermine traditional values and families. There is an obvious lack of knowledge especially amongst youth in this field and one of APY priorities is to fill this gap. JUB International (The Netherlands) is a youth organization, founded in 2011 in Groningen, The Netherlands, aiming to promote peace, understanding and cooperation between young people in the world. The organization aims to realize local and international youth activities, to promote tolerance between young people from different cultures and countries. Further, it tries to encourage active involvement in society, without any distinction because of race, social status, educational level or any other ‘disadvantage’. JUB works in a spirit of respect for human rights and we highly value sustainable development. The projects of JUB are carried out by trained professionals, mostly based on non-formal education methods, such as brainstorming, discussions, presentations, role plays, simulations and expert inputs. The proverb ‘learning by doing’ is most suitable here. In short, JUB creates a space for young people, to develop themselves.