Better Together – Youth Exchange

Finally we did it! – Better Together Youth Exchange started for real!! 

This project brings together young people from five European countries and Palestine for a large youth exchange to Sorin Sirkus in July 2022. Together with France, Czech Republic, Sweden, Slovenia and Palestine we will have about 60 youngsters and 12 trainers as participants for this exchange. Better Together will address the importance of working against climate change and climate anxiety as well as social exclusion. Youth exchange is themed also on well-being, cultural diversity and global understanding. How can we get well-being from circus and how we can be creative together are some of the questions that we will address during the exchange. 

To make the exchange possible in July, we need planning. That's why in April 2022 we welcomed 10 guests from the partner countries to make plans for the actual event. Each country sent one youngster and one trainer from their circus school. They brought ideas what they would like to do during the exchange and what kind of expertise they can provide. 

For two days we had preparation meetings where we planned workshops, evaluation, accommodation and safety. We had also one special visitor from the city of Tampere. Janina Ahlfors held a workshop about empowering photography and climate change. In this workshop we created beautiful pictures about feelings that come up concerning climate crisis. The same workshop will be held in Better Together for all the participants. We are very much looking forward to see all those pictures and making them into an exhibition. Though we had busy days with the planning, we also had time to go to sauna and dip in to freezeng lake, have some free training and meet some of Sorin Sirkus yougsters at dinner. 

During the planning we had many ideas suggested for the Better Together exchange. Luckily with good collaboration we found mutual understanding of the content. In a bigger scale our plans for the actual event are quite ready. Now we will work with all the practical details here at Sorin Sirkus and then just wait for all these awesome circus people arrive in Tampere! 

Through the exchange we hope to empower young people from all walks of life to improve their well-being and start feeling more connected to their peers both locally and across the Europe! Sorin Sirkus is ready for this amazing opportunity to host and welcome everybody to Finland! See you all soon!