On the occasion of the Anti-Bullying Day, ACTIon project partner Open Space Foundation shared a video produced by one of the youth teams during the MOLA (Model for Opinion Leaders’ Online Activation) training held by the end of August – the beginning of September 2022 in the city of Veliki Preslav, Bulgaria, within the framework of our project.

Each member of the team was either a victim or direct witness of bullying at school. The young people mention in the video that it is important to know how to counteract, to feel that they have support – from the adults around them and from their peers, and above all to talk about the subject and to know that they are not alone as the the target of bullying.

Anti-Bullying Day is an annual event held in Canada and other parts of the world and known as “Pink Shirt Day”,  where people wear a pink-coloured shirt to stand against bullying. The initiative was started in Canada in 2007 and held on the last Wednesday of February each year.

The initiators are the two students David Shepherd and Travis Price. On this day, they dress in pink to express their attitude towards the bullying and violence at school that they have witnessed at the opening of the school year at their school. Then they were greatly shaken by an incident – older students mocked and bullied a ninth-grader who was wearing a pink polo shirt. The boy could not stand the taunts and began to cry.  Impressed by what they saw, the very next day they bought and distributed 50 pink T-shirts to their classmates. This is how they wanted to express their support for the bullied student.

Read more here.