SFERA International organized the workshop “Pro-Dialogue” for representatives of educational institutions, civil society organizations, and NGOs on February 17, 2021, where we had a total of 18 participants present. 15 of the participants were representatives of NGOs and associations from the civic sector, 1 participant was representing the technical high school in Bitola, 1 participant was representing a primary school and 1 participant was representing a welfare organization.

The workshop had the following flow of activities:

• Project presentation by the project manager, Milcho Duli
• Presentation of the training course by Simona Sidrovska (one of the dialogators)
• Interactive workshop with the participants on the topic of homeless people, led by Simona
• Open discussion on the project topics and the need for dialogators is led by Katerina Popovska
• Closing and cocktail/ informal networking

In the end, we started a discussion with the participants about hate speech and fake news and what their perceptions and experiences were on these topics. Furthermore, we asked them about which vulnerable groups they thought were most affected by hate speech in our country and what we could do to raise awareness about this. Then, we continued talking about the roles of the dialogators: how much do the participants think that we have a need for dialogators, and do they think their institutions would benefit from training dialogators?

We had a fruitful discussion on all the above-mentioned topics, and we came to an overall agreement that dialogators are necessary for all of their institutions.

This workshop was organized as part of the project “PRO Dialogue”, which is a Strategic Partnership funded by the Erasmus plus programme.