TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Olga Kuczynska
This project in its key activity being seminar for trainers
- To offer international youth work and training practitioners a safe and trustful environment for sharing their experiences and bringing in specific cases from their practice of working with challenging groups
- To identify the key social, cultural, economic and political issues and trends that shape people's life experience in Europe today and cause tensions and conflicts.
- To develop understanding of how to approach complexity of conflicts of everyday realities through international youth work and training activities.
- To deepen participants knowledge, understanding of the roots of empathy for working with groups of people who have critical, indifferent, pessimistic worldviews and reflect our bias rooted in our backgrounds
- To review existing methodological practices and get familiarise with the new methods and approaches of conflict transformation to improve future international youth work and training programmes.
Main needs identified were:
- To develop empathy skills and how to use it in YW field
- To acquire/ improve tools on conflict transformation
- To have space for sharing between trainers around their approach towards conflicts in work environments
The project partners were experienced and trusted organisations from different Programme Countries and Partner Countries from the neighbouring regions, which work directly with young people and/or build capacity of youth workers at local, national and transnational levels.
All the partners have an established working relationship with the IYWT Guild through members and employees being actively engaged in Guild activities previously.
All participants were trainers and facilitators.
Countries involved: Armenia, Austria, Belarus, Germany, Greece, Italy, Montenegro,
Portugal, Serbia, The Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Ireland
Main working methods were:
- Mission Z board game will be used to address multidimensional and complex aspects of conflicts. Nectarus and Ha Moment organisations developed this game as a result of KA2 strategic partnership project. Mission Z is an interactive, educational board game which simulates a tense geographical area. Interactive game as a mean of learning stem from the principles of non-formal education, and aim to encourage a deeper reflection around the topics such as sustainable resource management, conflict and peace, migration and territories.
- Non Violent Communication is an approach to nonviolent living developed by Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s.[3] It is based on the idea that all human beings have the capacity for compassion and only resort to violence or behavior that harms themselves and others when they do not recognize more effective strategies for meeting needs.[4] Habits of thinking and speaking that lead to the use of violence (social, psychological and physical) are learned through culture. NVC theory supposes all human behavior stems from attempts to meet universal human needs and that these needs are never in conflict.
- Conflict Analysis tools: PIN model, timeline and others
Next to these main working methods we will apply common working methods used in training activities:
- Group dynamic activities such as name games, icebreakers, group building activities, participatory methods such as group work;
- Participants’ presentations, plenary discussions, group presentations, intercultural learning activities such as sauna evenings, field visits, group cultural activities;
- Learning to learn tools and methods such as the use of Open digital badges and Youthpass, peer reflection and feedback, debriefings;
- Evaluation activities such as mid-term and final evaluation of personal learning progress, group dynamics, course quality and management.
This seminar brought a group of International Youth Work trainers in the same place to develop their competences of conflict transformation.
Based on evaluation we had participants claiming improving their development of certain skills or managing conflict and attitudes towards being conscious around their role in the conflicts and their approach towards it.
We have implemented different activities to share the outcomes
Online:
1) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95kzqXOAQac
2) Posters with methods and tools: Position to Needs: https://create.piktochart.com/output/31936717-poster2 / Multidimensional Nature of Conflicts https://create.piktochart.com/output/31639576-poster-for-dissemination / More posters will be create and disseminated at long term, using the methods and tools facilitated during the seminar. In this way we provide a sustainable dissemination of it, instead of massively promoting in a short period of time.
3) Social Media of IYWT Guild and partners (including sharing of the video and posters)
4) Erasmus + project results platform
I was part of the trainers/ facilitators team, taking care for one of the main blocks in the seminar that was Non Violent Communication but as well facilitating parts of group process dynamics, discussions, reflections.