What happens when you give young people the tools and the trust to tell their own stories?
That's the question at the centre of the HATE-LESS Youth Media Laboratories, now underway in Cyprus.
The HATE-LESS project starts from a clear premise: that hate speech, disinformation, and racist narratives cannot be dismantled through top-down messaging alone. They need to be met with counter-narratives that are authentic, grounded, and told by the young people who experience today's media landscape first-hand.
At Waves Foundation for Global Education, we are translating this premise into practice in Cyprus through two parallel approaches:
Inside youth centres and schools, we are running a 20-hour programme with a group of 25 young people structured in smaller working groups rather than a single large cohort, to allow for deeper conversation and genuine collaboration. The programme introduces participants to media literacy, participatory research, and participatory video as a methodology, and will result in the co-production of 3 videos by the young people themselves.
Through an open call, we are also reaching young people who are curious about the topic but cannot commit to the full 20-hour track. This has been a deliberate choice on our part: we believe engagement should meet young people where they are, not demand that they meet us on a single set of terms. To date, over 40 young people in Cyprus have joined us through this route.
Both tracks share the same commitment — to create a space where young people can be exposed to new ideas, open up about their experiences, and use digital and audio-visual tools to speak back to the narratives that shape the world around them.
Follow along as we will be sharing the journey of each lab. Each one will have its own voices, its own questions, and its own final video.
HATE-LESS is co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme.
