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Description
The aim of the Opinion Festival is to advance the culture and quality of public debate and contribute to civic awareness. Opinion Festival does that by involving hundreds of CSOs, tens of thousands of people, young people and opinion leaders in knowledge-based and cultural public debate over two days in August each year in the center of Estonia, Paide city. Working together in an inclusive and innovative way leads to empowerment and increased collaboration in society. That in turn helps to decrease polarization and radicalization of public debate present in Estonian society today. CSOs are best equipped in society to bring together different groups, thus they are the main contributors to debates and the civic education program, Democracy Fitness, aimed at youth that takes place during the festival as well as during the year. The project benefits the whole Estonian society, in addition to thousands of people who attend the festival over two days and who receive new knowledge and participate in debates, the discussions are available for post-listening and post-viewing.
Summary of project results
* Low quality and polarization of public debate
* Low civic awareness of general population
During the project period, two main events of the project, Opinion Festivals (democracy festivals), took place, in August 2020 and August 2021 in Paide. The 2020 festival was seriously affected by Covid-19 restrictions and only 4000 people were allowed to attend the festival over two days. Altogether 55 different debates took place with fundamental rights and liberties as the main focus of debates. Feedback of participants and debate organizers was mainly positive (4,4/5) and 97% of participants would attend the festival again. There were 15 400 post-listenings of debates.
The 2021 festival was attended by 5600 people over two days. Altogether 133 different debates and discussions took place organized by 80 different CSOs and other organizations. The festival again enjoyed positive feedback. In reasons unknown to Project Promoter, there has been an enormous growth in post-viewing and post-listening of debates: by the time of final report debates have been post-viewed or post-listened over 200 000 times.
During both festivals and in-between Democracy Fitness programs have been carried out and attended by over 580 young people. Democracy Fitness program is about exercising one''s democracy muscles, e.g. empathy, curiosity, active listening, compromising, mobilizing each other, etc.
The Opinion Festival contributes to a stronger participatory democracy and greater civic awareness, involving hundreds of CSO, tens of thousands of people and hundreds of young people in a knowledge-based and cultural public debate, shaping policies together in an inclusive and innovative way and empowering CSOs, and cooperation between them. By fostering methods of qualitative and inclusive debate and discussion, participants learn to value the quality of argument and demand that from opinion leaders and politicians, thus raising the quality of political culture in general. Participation of youth