The Youth Civic Action Academy (YCAA) was designed to build out dedicated support for young Jordanians in order to support young people taking an active role in preventing violence and building social cohesion in their local communities.

For the past two years, participants have worked with a diverse set of stakeholders, while promoting media literacy and combating hate speech, cyberbullying, dis/misinformation and violent extremism. Following an exchange in the United States, YCAA participants are showcasing innovative projects that support their peers, and their communities in challenging polarisation, hate, and extremism across Jordan.

The program worked with young people and local communities to enhance their:

• Understanding of civic processes and action, including sessions on civic responsibilities and offline and online citizenship;
• Understanding of hate, misinformation/disinformation and extremism online;
• Skills for initiative and campaign design, development and delivery with experts, civil society partners, youth multimedia hubs — including the largest Jordanian online production and dissemination platform in the country — steeped in civic action, as well as online and offline campaigning and initiative design;
• Project management skills, including proposal development, financial management, monitoring and evaluation, and reporting.

The Six Youth-led Initiatives implemented through the YCAA project:

1. Kelmetak Athar (based in Irbid): Focused on raising awareness about the psychological impact of cyberbullying on young people, this youth-led initiative organized a number of trainings on how to deal with cyberbullying, and its effects on victims. Professional psychosocial support was offered to young people through a partnership with the local organization Arab Women Organization.
2. Men Haggak (based in Zarqa): This initiative used arts and interactive theater to engage youth affected by cyberbullying in Zarqa. Participants shared their stories and worked on the development of mitigating practices.
3. Yalla Netghayyar (based in Karak): This initiative focused on the factors that can lead individuals to embrace violent extremism. Through the use of sports, art and theatre, this initiative engaged local communities and worked with children and young people to implement activities in cooperation with the municipality, local organizations and schools.
4. Meqrab (based in Irbid): This initiative worked on countering disinformation and misinformation by holding training sessions with journalism and media students to raise their awareness about this issue and equip them with tools to verify information. Young people also developed a mobile awareness-raising unit at public parks in the city of Irbid.
5. Masdarak (based in Zarqa): By developing an online platform to aggregate verified sources for articles and other information shared online, youth created a ‘search-engine’ like platform to provided fact-checked information to the community.
6. Taharra (based in Karak): This initiative focused on fact-checking misleading narratives and providing verified content to a mailing list of civil society, government, and other notable influencers in their community, as well as through a segment on a local radio station. The young people engaged in this initiative also conducted community-level awareness raising, posting signs about disinformation and misinformation on the streets of Karak. Young people similarly led a workshop with Karak-based journalists on how to identify misinformation and disinformation.

About the Youth Study Tour in the United States:

ISD coordinated a trip for six Jordanian young professionals who were part of the YCAA project in its two rounds of 2022-2023, where they focused on a variety of youth and community resilience issues, e.g. hate speech, cyberbullying, social cohesion, violence prevention, and women’s empowerment. During the tour, they met with a number of United States entities engaging in similar issues – NGOs, academia, and government (federal, state, and local) – in order to learn about the design, development and delivery of community/youth resilience programs across the US.