The EdVenture Partners (EVP) and the Youth Education Committee (YEC) with the support from the U.S. Department of State are inviting interested students to participate in a global initiative P2P: Challenging Extremism (P2PCE). They will have an opportunity to build social campaign to counter online extremism and to win trip to Washington D.C. in June 2015!
Societies in many countries are increasingly challenged by terrorist and extremist groups who have demonstrated enormous skill and sophistication with technology and social media. They have successfully made “jihad” cool, their brand attractive, and propaganda believable with global youth, resulting in increased numbers of extremist recruits. This increasingly effective threat must be contested in the on-line space being manipulated by these groups, to erode their power, influence and will. It is vital that societies begin implementing tougher, hard-hitting online responses to win the digital war against these groups.
The project consists of two phases: to develop and implement Millennial-designed communication campaigns and viral activations that challenge violent extremism ideology, propaganda and recruitment messaging and to launch a wide-reaching global social media beta test that prototypes, tests and validates large numbers of peer-generated CVE strategies and tactics that can be scaled and pushed out.
EVP program is a pathway for young people, social networks and engaged communities to help counter violent extremist messaging and recruitment. By enlisting tech-savvy, digitally aware students from throughout the world, real progress with social impact can be realized. Students will create and implement culturally relevant and credible digital campaigns to engage civic minded university students and uncommitted populations. In the EVP program, university students in marketing, communications, digital media, security and peace studies as well as other fields relevant to the assignment, become a semester-long communications agency that uses social media to motivate uncommitted youth to speak up against violent extremism through the creation of credible content, counter narratives and alternative messaging.
A total of twenty (20) teams, fourteen (14) from the U.S. and six (6) internationally will each receive a $2,000 operational budget to implement their campaign. Students will use this budget to implement various on-line and social media strategies, videos, student-developed mobile apps and other digital activations designed to educate, motivate and impact positive decision making behaviors with civic minded university students and the uncommitted populations. In the EVP program model, students and faculty release IP, allowing the most effective digital campaigns and approaches to be scaled up and pushed out in the future. The project also includes an international competition where the top domestic and international university teams will receive all travel expenses and scholarship awards to present their campaign to an inter-governmental agency panel in Washington, D.C. and compete for scholarship awards.
SAFETY AND SECURITY: The safety and security of students are paramount. This initiative is not designed to confront any one extremist group; the project’s main focus is to create campaigns to educate the public and uncommitted youth about counter extremism wherever it may exist. As a civilian sponsored initiative by U.S. Department of State, this program needs to be 100% open and transparent as it is designed as a U.S. Department of State sponsored international public diplomacy communications initiative to engage youth against extremism.
Status: This campaign is in active development between the U.S. Department of State and EVP. All final project elements will be included and shared in the project brief at time of program launch, Spring 2015 term.
Objective: To engage U.S. and international universities and their students to create and implement digitally driven social media initiatives among youth that energizes and engages large networks of people to counter violent extremism (CVE) in a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Educational and Cultural Affairs.
WHO CAN APPLY?
Bachelor or Master University students who study in Serbia and hold a Serbian citizenship, age 18 to 30 should send your CV and application form to p2pce@iea.rs no later than January 25, 2015 by 23:59hrs.
The results will be available on the www.iea.rs on January 26, 2015 by 23:59hrs. The confirmation of the participation has to be sent no later than January 27, 2015 by 11:00hrs.
COSTS
Admission fee for the program is 20 euros in local currency. All costs related to the program are covered by the organizer which include: tuition, development of the camping, local travel costs and materials. No accommodation will be provided, however students outside of Belgrade will be reimbursed bus or train costs to be able to attend the meetings.
All activities are organized in Belgrade in the American Corner except the presentation of the winning teams which will be hosted in Washington D.C., USA in the beginning of June 2015.
HOW WILL THE TEAM WORK?
Team will be formed from selected participants from Serbia. Participants will meet once a week and work together to create their own campaign and/or initiative to counter violent extremism online. They will together operate with $2,000 budget in order to implement their idea. Representatives of the teams whose campaign and/or initiative has the best results will present their work in Washington D.C. together with other international teams in June 2015 and receive a reward – $5,000 for first place, $3,000 for second place and $1,000 for third place.
PROJECT TIMELINE
| January 25, 2015 by 23.59hrs | Application deadline |
| January 28, 2015 at 15.00hrs | Program kick-off web chat with the U.S. Department of State representatives. Participation details will be provided to selected participants. |
| March 12, 2015 | Deadline for submitting creative brief for quality check. Funds will be granted after this approval. |
| April 27, 2015 by 17.00 hrs | Final submission deadline. |
| April 28 – May 7, 2015 | Judging of submissions |
| May 8, 2015 | Results notification deadline. |
| May 10, 2015 | Deadline for travel documents submission for the top teams attendees. |
| May 18, 2015 | Deadline for submission of presentation by the top teams attendees. |
| June 3, 2015 | Top teams arrive in Washington D.C. |
| June 4, 2015 | Presentation by top teams to the U.S. State Department and other intergovernmental agency leaders. |
Team meetings:
The meetings are starting on January 28 and from February 7 to April 25 once a week. Meetings could be organized even after but no after May 28 2015. In order for the participant to be taken into consideration for the trip to Washington D.C. it has to take active participation in at least 80% of meetings.
Organizers:
Since 1990, the EdVenture Partners has been building academic partnerships for government, countries, companies, NGO’s and trade associations across the globe. The problems EVP solves are awareness and perception issues facing a brand, product or service. EVP’s innovative approach has been used on over 800 universities to reach targeted audiences for the U.S. Department of State, Time Magazine, Morocco, Canada, Citibank, Honda, American Petroleum Institute, Shell Oil, AT&T and Qatar, among others.
Youth Education Committee is a non-governmental organisation seated in Belgrade. It aims at compensating for the critical gaps made within the system of formal education: this system contributes to the authoritarian society and obstructs development of critical thinking. Therefore the organization strives to provide the youth in Serbia proper informal education, as well as to address long-term analysis of the formal, evaluate changes and give recommendations to the institutions responsible. The goal of the Youth Education Committee is to equip young people with enough knowledge and skills to ensure their active role in society.
