TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Hermine Papikyan
We aimed with this youth exchange to promote awareness about recycle practices among different countries by means of research and result sharing as well as on spot recycling practices to reduce and reuse by the young people to foster youth initiatives on environmental protection around the world, increasing sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, more active participation in society.
Objectves of the project:
-Raising awareness of young people about alternative usage of waste to reduce its elimination to nature
- Sharing and integrating best practices and methods of local communities on approaches towards recycling opportunities and possibilities by young people.
-Experiencing and going through various activities on reusing and recycling by on spot practices and useful creations
-Fostering youth initiatives and entrepreneurship on community wellbeing topics by organizing expositions out of the recycled materials
-Coming up with follow-up activities in the principle of multiplication fostering quality improvements in youth work and youth initiatives for young people participation and social inclusion.
The choice of the countries in which associations operate was considerably thought creating balance of Programme Countries and Partner Countries neighbouring the EU. Thus,(Poland, Latvia, Armenia, Georgia) are selected in order to benefit from the diversity of experiences and ideas on the topic of the exchange projects.
As working methods, we used essentially non-formal and informal education with games, online activities, self evaluation tool for personal acknowledgements, simulation, organisation of recycling exhibition, by the participants, as well as outdoors activities, cultural production, mix of informal, formal and non-formal and outdoor activities.
Welcome activities, team-building, group-building, ice-breaking, simulation games, workshops for introduction to the topic and getting to know each other wiere organized using digital/online tools and activities to jump into the project context, building cohesion, trust, integration and open participation of all. Outdoor activities were encouraged to the utmost.
This youth exchange resulted in developing competencies and life skills that are essential to become active and responsible people for their communities as the project is completely based on “Learning by Doing” competence right from the beginning- project idea generation, its development, gathering like-mind and interested people around the idea, cooperation with the local sending NGOs for their support, local need assessment among youth to find out the needs in environmental issues and build the project on them, negotiations to find an applicant organisation, organising online team meetings, concept design, etc.
Organiser of the youth exchange and facilitator.