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Description
„Mission Siberia“project is a citizenship education project that builds social awareness, patriotism, and civic engagement by encouraging historical remembrance. The main problem addressed by the project is the lack of practical opportunities for young people to form their sense of civic engagement and express their citizenship. The project is aimed to complement school civic education programmes with valuable experiential learning opportunities. The inspiration for the project became „Mission Siberia“ – the national-wide initiative that has been organized for 15 years in a row. The initiative consisted of annual expeditions to the places where Lithuanian people were deported and imprisoned during the Soviet occupation. During those expeditions, young people could „touch the history with their own hands“, clean up Lithuanian cemeteries, document and collect local people‘s stories etc. During the project, participants of the previous expeditions organized meetings with young people in Lithuanian schools, communities, youth NGOs. The meetings aimed to encourage the active participation of young people in civic activities through videos, memory sharing and discussions about the most critical episodes of Lithuanian and European history. 458 young people participated in the meetings. A survey on the impact of Mission Siberia on civic activism in Lithuania was carried out.