Building a critical mass of youth workers against hate speech and disinformation one workshop at a time.
On 20 February 2026, Waves Foundation for Global Education hosted the Cyprus edition of the HATE-LESS Youth Worker Cascade Training — a 5-hour workshop bringing together 15 youth workers and educators from across the island.
The HATE-LESS project responds to a pressing European challenge: the weaponisation of disinformation and hate speech against vulnerable groups, particularly migrants and minorities. Our role is to ensure that youth workers — often the first point of contact for young people navigating these narratives — have the tools, methodologies, and confidence to respond.
During the workshop, participants:
• Engaged with the methodological guidelines and toolkit developed by the HATE-LESS partnership
• Familiarised themselves with participatory video as a pedagogical approach
• Tested practical activities designed to deconstruct hate speech, disinformation, and racist narratives
• Reflected on how to adapt the methodology to their own contexts and youth groups
What we took away was clear: there is strong appetite in Cyprus for this work.
Every participant expressed interest in staying connected with the project and following its evolution — a signal that the cascade model is working, and that media literacy is increasingly recognised as a core competence for youth work today.
Next, a selection of these youth workers will move into the second phase: facilitating laboratories with young people in Cyprus, supporting them to conduct participatory research and produce their own participatory videos on issues that matter to them.
This is how change compounds — through training the trainers, then trusting young people to tell their own stories.
HATE-LESS is co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme.
