To start our Participative Forum month, our French volunteer Oli made us think and debate about the complex topic that is democracy. We had some banana cake thanks to our lovely baker Aiden !
The first thing we did was presenting ourselves and our background and our stories in order to understand each other better. For this same purpose, we had a little energizer so that we could dive straight into the subject. After getting to know each other, we were asked to think about politics in general, what it meant to us, what institutions we had, what our different systems were, all this by ourselves writing on paper.
It was just a preparation for the real deal… Oli paired us and asked us to discuss what we just wrote about. It was a nice time to discuss everyone’s thoughts and systems, that’s why we tried to mix nationalities as much as possible. Once our minds and tongues were warmed up, the final activity could start. In the same pairs, we had to come up with our own definition of democracy!
We all managed to get one when we were in pairs of course, but after that we were added to another group, and we still had to agree on a definition. It got harder and harder until the point where we had two groups who had similar definitions, on paper, but the phrasing was another difficulty. We then decided to put everything in common and to finally agree on key concepts.
Our pooling of knowledge was followed by a short reflection on what we learnt today, and discussed how we could spread the information! This is how we redefined democracy in our own terms, in our ephemera community…
