TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Mahmoud ElSayed
The Active Citizens: Youth for Democracy and Participation exchange aimed to bridge the growing gap between young people and democratic life across Europe. The core need we identified — through consultations with participants and partner organisations — was that young people from Germany, Latvia, Turkey, Romania, and Spain felt disconnected from decision-making processes and lacked practical spaces to experience democracy in action. The training addressed three interconnected needs: the need for hands-on civic education that goes beyond theory; the need for media literacy skills to navigate an increasingly complex information landscape; and the need for structured leadership and intercultural learning experiences for young people with fewer opportunities. The activity aligned directly with our organisations' shared goals of developing active, informed, and empowered young citizens through non-formal education. It also responded to the Erasmus+ priority of promoting democratic participation and common European values among youth. Rather than teaching democracy as a subject, we designed the entire programme so that participants would experience democratic principles — debate, negotiation, minority rights, civic action — through every activity across the seven days.
The target group consisted of 30 young people aged 18 to 25, representing five countries: Germany, Latvia, Turkey, Romania, and Spain. The group was intentionally diverse — including participants from urban and rural backgrounds, young people active in local youth councils and NGOs, and young people with fewer opportunities who had limited prior experience of international mobility or civic engagement. The exchange was fully international, bringing together participants with different political realities, cultural contexts, and relationships to democratic systems. This diversity was not incidental — it was the methodology. When a young person from Turkey, Romania, and Germany debate minority rights or freedom of speech in the same room, the conversation is grounded in lived reality, not abstraction. Particular attention was given to ensuring the group included voices that are often underrepresented in European youth work: participants from countries with more complex relationships to EU institutions, and young people who had not previously engaged with formal civic education. The intercultural dimension was woven through every session, with national groups taking turns to lead intercultural evenings and contribute country-specific perspectives to all thematic discussions.
The entire programme was designed around non-formal and experiential learning methods, placing participants as active agents rather than passive recipients. Every activity had a clear learning objective, a structured debrief, and a connection to the broader themes of democracy, media literacy, and civic action. Key methods included: Simulation and role play — In Utopia Rules, teams built their own country from scratch with a 15-article constitution, then had to negotiate a merger with another team, cutting half their rules. Crisis cards were injected mid-negotiation to stress-test their decisions. In Activism vs. Vandalism, participants debated controversial civil disobedience scenarios under structured speaking constraints (based on gender and power roles) designed to make inequality felt rather than just discussed. Structured debate — We used the open Fishbowl format throughout the exchange, with genuinely controversial topics drawn from participants' real political contexts. The empty chair format allowed anyone to tap into the debate at any moment, modelling democratic participation directly. Values clarification — Activities such as Where Do You Stand? and Take a Step Forward (the privilege game) used physical movement to surface values, challenge assumptions, and create embodied understanding of structural inequality. World Café and cooperative learning — Rotating table discussions on citizenship, European identity, and culture allowed participants to build on each other's thinking across national groups. Non-formal reflection tools — Daily reflection sessions used structured prompts, sentence completions, and visual methods to consolidate learning. These outputs were also collected as raw material for the co-created Active Citizens Guide. Site visit — The guided tour of Sachsenhausen Memorial grounded the week's abstract themes in concrete historical reality, connecting democracy and human rights to lived European memory.
The training achieved its core objectives and produced both measurable outcomes and meaningful personal transformation among participants. In terms of measurable impact: more than 80% of participants reported improved understanding of democratic processes and their own role as citizens. Participants from all five national groups left with concrete dissemination plans — including workshops, school presentations, and youth council sessions — designed to reach at least 1,000 additional young people in their home communities. Each national group also contributed to the co-creation of the Active Citizens Guide, a practical digital resource published freely online for youth workers and young people across Europe. Participant feedback reflected genuine shifts in confidence, perspective, and motivation. Many reported that the non-formal methods — particularly the simulation and debate activities — gave them tools they intend to use directly in their own facilitation and community work. Several participants noted it was the first time they had experienced democracy as a practice rather than a concept. The exchange also surfaced important learning for the facilitation team: feedback indicated that a small number of dominant voices occasionally crowded out quieter participants, and that some participants felt the programme could have offered more variety across the days. These insights have been directly integrated into future programme design. Publication: The Active Citizens Guide — a 30-page practical resource on civic participation, media literacy, and youth-led action — was co-created by participants during the exchange and is available online as a free resource for youth workers and young people across Europe. [Link to be added upon publication]
I served as the lead trainer and main facilitator for the full duration of the seven-day exchange, working full-time throughout the programme from arrival to closing. My responsibilities spanned the entire training cycle: I led the design of the programme methodology, selected and adapted the non-formal learning activities to fit the group's profile and the project's objectives, and facilitated the majority of sessions directly. I worked alongside co-facilitators from the partner organisations, who each took responsibility for one programme day under my overall coordination and methodological guidance. Beyond direct facilitation, I was responsible for the learning architecture of the exchange — ensuring that each day built intentionally on the previous one, that reflection was embedded consistently throughout, and that the progression from knowledge to skills to attitudes was maintained across the full seven days. I conducted the midterm evaluation with participants, used the findings to adapt the second half of the programme, and led the final evaluation and closing session. I also provided ongoing coaching and methodological support to the national co-facilitators, helping them design and deliver their assigned sessions in line with non-formal education principles. With more than five years of experience as a trainer in youth work, democracy education, and intercultural learning, this exchange represented a continuation of my practice in designing and facilitating transformative learning experiences for young people across Europe.
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