The winners of the “Mosaic Youth Prize – with diversity against racism” 2022 have been announced. A total of nine projects, four of them from Nuremberg, can look forward to an award. At the end of July 2022, Munich and Nuremberg will jointly award the “Mosaic Youth Prize” with a festive award ceremony, and will finance half of the €9,000 prize money each. The following projects and actions will be honoured; the first prize of €5,000 goes to the “Stage for Peace” from Nuremberg. The second prize is awarded to two projects, “Das SchüPa an der Guardini” and “ClubIn Blog – das Sprachrohr für junge Neumünchner*innen” both from Munich. Both winners will receive €2000 each. The third prize of €1000 goes to “Jewish Life” from Nuremberg.
The “Mosaic Youth Prize” was launched in 2015 in memory of the Bavarian victims of the right-wing terror group “National Socialist Underground” (NSU). The award is given to projects by adolescents and young adults in Munich and Nuremberg up to the age of 25. The jury is made up of the members of the victims’ families from Nuremberg and Munich, one representative each from the Munich Migration Advisory Council and the Nuremberg Integration Advisory Council as well as three young people from Munich and two young people from Nuremberg. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, which is placing a heavy burden on the work of young, committed people, a total of eleven people, initiatives, organisations and schools have applied. Eight of these applications came from Nuremberg.
Fight Racsim Sticker Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
The winning projects at a glance
1st place: The first place goes to “Stage for Peace” a project which was launched in the winter of 2015 by Maria Bahn with the intention of organising concerts where the entire profit goes to refugee initiatives. “Stage for Peace” organises the events on a voluntary basis, the venues are provided free of charge and the bands play for free. Admission is on a donation basis, so that low-threshold access is made possible for all and the evenings are a cultural offer for the broad city society. In addition to financial support, the project is about informing people about the situation of refugees in Europe and what concrete support can look like. With “Stage for Peace” over €8,000 in donations was raised for a good cause. Even during the pandemic, the project continued its work on social media channels, reporting on the situation of refugees and organising a donation auction.
The Project “Stage for Peace” from Nuremberg is a festival for peace, tolerance and respect.
2nd place: Second place goes to two projects. “SchüPa” is a student parliament at a secondary school in Guardinistraße in Munich. The starting point for the democracy project was the consideration that the children and young people at the school do not get involved enough, are not able to bring their interests into the social discourse and turn their backs on politics. However, since a democracy thrives on the participation of its citizens, the initiators at the school felt it was important to create new opportunities for participation of the pupils. Since the start of the project, a parliament with currently 18 members and three student spokespeople have been established in the past five years, includinga new drinking water dispenser, and the renovation of the playground and the neighbourhood. The project “ClubIn Blog – the mouthpiece for young people in Neumünchen”, was launched by young adults who have only recently arrived in Germany to provide a platform for themselves and other young adults with similar biographies, and those who are more in the public eye. Through personal texts, the authors provide an insight into the everyday lives in their home countries, their experiences as newcomers in Munich, their wishes and plans for the future and their view of the world and the things they experience. The blog’s linguistic diversity addresses a broad audience and also provides low-threshold access for non-native speakers of German. Editors of the blog supplement these personal contributions with topics on getting to and getting on in Germany, as well as current issues, including in times of the pandemic.
3rd place: The project “Jewish Life” from the secondary school “Hummelsteiner Weg” in Nuremberg, is a project in which pupils of two 8th classes dealt intensively with Jewish life in the past and today. The project was not only in the classroom, but also in their free time and was supported by the student council (SMV). The results include a short documentary and a presentation on Judaism in the cities of Nuremberg and Fürth with a city map showing how Jewish life has changed in the vicinity of the school. To do this, the pupils searched through archives,contacted the Jewish Museum in Fürth and talked to Jews in the city. The project also gave impetus to other projects for more tolerance, such as a play and a podcast series on the subject of racism and antisemitism.
Further information about the prize can be found at: https://www.nuernberg.de/internet/menschenrechte/mosaik_jugendpreis.html
This article is written in British English based on the Press release from the City of Nuremberg, 10th March 2022.
