"Social diplomacy-mindmapping opportunities"

CGB Armenia in cooperation with Academy of innovation is inviting you for partnership in PBA that will be held in Armenia in February 2016.
The "Social diplomacy-mindmapping opportunities" is Partnership Building Activity (PBA), with the aim of gathering youth NGOs from different countries, which have similar missions and objectives related to social diplomacy especially to strengthening public participation in decision making processes, promoting dialogue and deliberation.
This project aims to creating a diverse network of youth organizations bringing together young diplomats acting for social change through active participation. The meeting will offer a place to discuss to discuss, to decide, and to create an action plan together in order to address the today’s toughest challenges.
Main objectives of the activity are:
• To explore the meaning of social diplomacy in a current social and political situations in different countries, to identify its potential, limits, challenges and current state.
• To get-to-know each other personally and professionally;
• To Share own “success stories” and making social diplomacy in a change-making process at local level;
• To identify the common “change field” – main challenges to be addressed centralized as a network of young diplomats.
• To innovative mechanisms and to develop a new ideas to draft project ideas.
• To contribute to capacity building of other organizations by doing “peer reviews”;
• To deepen knowledge on EYF and Erasmus + programs, other European and national funding opportunities and to find potential partners for applications.
Within a framework of this project a co-working platform will be created for more effective capacity building - sharing an experience and getting actual knowledge, realization of the joined projects and grants applications.
The group is planned to be consisted of 26 people from 20 organisations, which seems to be an optimal number of participants for the effective brainstorming and group activities.
A non-formal manner of activities and beautiful views of the region should additionally motivate participants to feel free-and-easy and be actively involved in workshops.
Another important factor, which affects on project impact is the professionalism of the trainers team, which will be consisting of people from different nationalities, educational and working backgrounds. With the purpose of better teambuilding, the selection of the participants will be done as detailed as possible, taking into account experience, interests, motivation, clear follow up and contribution. Moreover, the program will be adapted to participants’ personal needs and appropriate working environments, trying to make rather flexible one.
Choosing Armenia as hosting country, current trends in public sector, which are rather fast-growing in the country, were taken into account. Thus, cognitive meetings with representatives of some successful formal and non-formal initiatives will give an additional opportunity of getting acquainted with their experience. Moreover, they will collaborate with professionals at place on developing real solutions related to introduced issues.
The permanent platform that is going to be created during this project can serve as a virtual “meeting point” to continue discussions about implementation and why not to inform participants about the ongoing processes and results. This will be an indicator of sustainability, that project can have after the end.