TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Corina Pintea
This as an international training course that brought together participants to explore the topic of youth activism and ways to promote and enhance it. The main objective was to stimulate the participants’ potential for action and improve their competences in empowering other youth to take an active role in their communities. By using interactive non-formal education methods, we discovered participants’ individual motives for active participation and then extended this analysis to general reasons for youth to get involved and become active, as well as to ways of stimulating this process. Activities included the non-formal defining and discovery of the concept of European citizenship, debating types of activism and choosing the most suitable, exchanging and creating effective methods to activate youth, implementing a mini-project in the local community and exploring the opportunities Youth in Action offered for youth to become active participants in their communities’ lives.
The training had 24 participants from 8 countries: Cyprus, Greece, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and Turkey. These were mainly youth workers, group leaders, project coordinators and volunteers involved in community projects in their countries and they all had experience mobilizing youth to become active citizens.
The trainers'team was made up of Nicoleta Chis-Racolta (Romania) and Corina Pintea (Romania).
The training used a lot of very creative methods, focusing on the power that non-formal education has for an effective and lasting learning effect: brainstorming, role-play, debate (fishbowl), simulation, creative workshops, community reach and small-project implementation, video-making, artistic expression, group work, group reflection and introspection, Carnival evening and self-disclosure activities.
Participants had a chance to discover 8 different types of activitism (volunteering, philanthropy, responsible behaviour to the environment, getting involved in decision-making process of the public authorities, recycling and reusing, online activism and others). A powerful result was the stimulation of participants'sense of initiative and their empowerment to take action and mobilize others, which was reflected in many of the evaluation forms. Group work was very intense and rewarding, participants created small one-day volunteering projects in the local community. Another strong element was related to the discussion of common European values and the ways they can be applied in youth projects. We placed a large emphasis on creative and innovative ways of learning and of expression, using them with participants to inspire them to use them also in their work. We had no doubt the training was a success as we received many reviews and feedback at the end and long after it, telling us about the strong impact it had on participants and their will to get involved. Moreover, even now we are in contact with some of the participants who remain active and who still remember the huge ipact the training had on them.
I was a full-tie member of the team of trainers, having responsibilities in all the phases of the project: partner identification, designing the training content and flow, implementing activities, evaluating the training, administrative tasks related to Youthpass certificates, reimbursement and others.