At the end of the European Year of Citizens "Open Youth " successfully completes its work on the project "Unveiling European Union citizenship rights through Powerful messages, Developed in Attractive Technological Environment” (UPDATE).

The project partners are NGOs from Hungary, Belgium and the Netherlands. The goal was to develop an original comic book, explaining to the young people their basic European citizens’ rights in an interesting and understandable way and to reach the tech-savvy youth wherever they are, combining the message with this risk-free traffic participation one.
Within the project 105 volunteers were trained, 23 campaigns were carried out and feedback was taken from the 2845 young people.
The most interesting conclusions from the trained volunteers, based on their feedback, are:
1. 77% of them have never used their EU rights, but 96% think that they will need them in the future.
2 . On a scale of 1 to 5 they evaluate their knowledge of EU rights at 3 before training and at 4 after it.
3 . On a scale of 1 to 5 they evaluate the knowledge of the young project participants about their EU rights at 2.4 before the respective campaign and at 3.7 after it.
More interesting findings for the European rights on the basis of completed questionnaires by involved young people:
1. The total proportion of given correct answers is 66 %.
2 . There is no gender difference, ie proportion of correct answers given by boys and girls was 66 %.
3 . Most correct answers are given by the youngest participants, aged 12 to 17 years - 72%.
More interesting conclusions about the Bulgarian participation :
1. 77% of the answers, given by the Bulgarian participants, are correct while 66% of Dutch, 62% of Belgian and 54% of Hungarian participants answered correctly.
2 . A significant improvement in knowledge of the Bulgarians is observed: 65% gave the correct answer to the question, related to the acquisition of citizenship in a Member State of the European Union (41% in 2008); 66% gave the correct answer to the question, related to participation in local elections (38% in 2008), and 49% gave the correct answer to the question, related to participation in the European elections (39% in 2008).
The UPDATE Project is co-funded by the European Commission within the program "Europe for Citizens", Action 2.3. In Bulgaria Project activities were carried out in Sofia, Vratsa, Belogradchik, Blagoevgrad, Pernik, Smolyan, Stara Zagora and Pleven. The project website is http://update.open-youth.org
Links to video and presentation of the results of the project can be found at http://open-youth.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=249&Itemid=32