Ideology Current Aims

IDEOLOGY

While Firefly's focus in Bosnia was on communities divided by ethnicity and war, we plan to focus on social division in general, whether caused by religion, economics, race, history, language, nationality or simply geographical distance.

We believe that for social change to occur, it's important for people to gain personal links, interest and insight into other communities so that they have a reason to care about what happens to these other communities. For this to happen, people's networks of friends, acquaintances and colleagues must cross boundaries of race, nationality, or language along which they're often based, so that people's personal concerns are not just about people in their own area. The most simple way of doing this is just to ensure that people meet and work with more people from other countries.

The principle we used in Bosnia was that for each dividing force between individuals in a community, there will be many links - such as shared cultural heritage, language, artistic tastes, or simply love of food. The idea was to strengthen these shared interests and to create multiple personal links along them. It was important for these links to exist between people, not just NGOs or voluntary groups, since whole communities need to care what happens to others to have a concrete effect. We now plan to apply this principle to other people and groups around the world.

Firefly's core belief is that it is vital for marginalised and vulnerable groups to become less isolated, more confident and to be given opportunities to play a greater part in society as a whole. As a result the majority of our projects will focus on marginalised, vulnerable and minority groups - refugees, children, women, ethnic minorities and other such groups. Since social division is often unequal, we want to create links between grass-roots communities that allow them the strength and the support to be heard.

CURRENT AIMS

Initially, Firefly International will be working in the following ways:

1) Running our existing projects - summer camps and festivals - that aim to bring together youth workers, artists and volunteers from different countries, and to support young people and children in Bosnia & the UK.

2) Supporting individuals & groups who wish to run projects collaborating with others internationally, by helping to link them to other individuals or groups worldwide, find funding for their projects, and identify spaces where they can run them.

3) Exhibiting resulting work or supporting resulting projects, & aiding in finding free or affordable exhibition or project/workshop spaces.

3) Finding funding to set up the main lines of collaboration - festivals and publishing - that we will run, and supporting individuals in

4) Setting up staff exchanges between organisations in different countries.

Read about Firefly's Bosnia projects in 'Playing for their lives', an article by Louise Rimmer in the Scotland on Sunday's 'Spectrum' magazine