Tolerance
Voices of Tolerance of Promoting Tolerance Alumni
Watch and read below some of the most valuable and memorable insights of the distinguished alumni of the Promoting Tolerance Programme.
How has your participation in the Promoting Tolerance Programme influenced your work?
I would wish that people would continue understanding that diversity is a richness that we need to nourish. Tolerance will always be needed to be cherished and promoted. Because diversity is never easy to understand.
For me very useful during the programme was the exposure to different forms of dialogue. The cooperation between FNF and AJC, given the background of the German and Jewish nations, gives an inspiring model of tolerance. …This is very useful for my work now for building peaceful neighbouring relations.
This is a Programme that comes back to you every time you face difficulties, challenges or confront the majority opinion. ... It is a kind of a Programme that gives you a reality check all the time... You know that there are people out there, who carry the same values, who fight on a daily basis challenges and who try to convince more people that beauty is in diversity.
How has your participation in the Promoting Tolerance Programme influenced your work?
The Promoting Tolerance programme is where we learned we are not alone. ...I am not alone fighting for democracy.
The Promoting Tolerance programme helps you to think and to have more “colour” in your decision-making and in your life.
Thanks to the Programme, I understood that liberal democracy, freedom, tolerance are not to be taken for given, they are something one should fight for.
How has your participation in the Promoting Tolerance Programme influenced your work? - Ep. 2
The problem of the liberals and open-minded people is that we are like athletes very individual. On the other side, the xenophobic forces and intolerant political parties are unified, while we, liberal minded people, are fragmented.
The essential is talking and listening to each other. We talk more than we listen. We have to listen to the others. Hence, we can understand them.
It is always worth asking another person’s side of the story. Not just asking, but also listening to it.
It was an invaluable lesson to learn that there are different countries and communities with various challenges, but there is no universal solution. There are different approaches and best practices. When I got back to Hungary, I had a ton of ideas, and we managed to implement some of them in our programmes.
Promoting tolerance is relevant today, because there is no other way to make a better world for our children and their children.
Next time when we celebrate an anniversary of this Programme, we will be able to celebrate the “post populism” world.
Watch below voices of tolerance in a series of videos, devoted to the quarter of a century of the Programme. The videos include full recordings of the keynote speeches, the panel discussion and a series of interviews with high-level guests, alumni, panellists, current fellows, FNF and AJC representatives. All videos can be found in the YouTube playlist below on our FreedomTV Europe channel.