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Featured in USIP report


Most Mira was featured as case study in the United States Institute of Peace report on “Reconciliation in Practice.”

From page 26:

"For a number of years, Most Mira, a European organization operating in the northwest region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has hosted the Youth Festival to “build a bridge of understanding and tolerance between the young people of the Prijedor Municipality using the arts in a spirit of creative collaboration and participation.” The region, which was relatively ethnically mixed before the Bosnian war, is now largely segregated along ethnic lines regionally and by school, divisions that this festival actively tried to break down. In the festival’s first year in 2009, children age six to fifteen came from one Serbian village and one Muslim village. In 2011, the festival included children from six schools or youth groups from across the region, many of whom organized fundraising activities to help sponsor the five-day festival. The festival entailed three days of various forms of art, such as theater, filmmaking, dance, and circus activities, and a final day for participants to perform for one another, as well as their friends, parents, and other community members. Wide participation was a key objective, and children who are largely divided in their day-to-day lives attended the festivities to “play together, have fun together, and build new friendships” to show each other and their wider communities what they can achieve together. The evaluation report for the 2010 festival, which included a survey for teachers and volunteers and small focus group discussions and a collaborative body mapping exercise for the youth participants, highlights the success of the festival in building tolerance and promoting wide participation. Notably, children expressed their enjoyment of the creative activities and discussed how collaboration and learning with their activity group members helped foster friendships across lines of division."

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