TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Cristina Arenare
The project “Breaking Gender Barriers Through Youth Work” aims at:
- Raising awareness of Youth Workers/leaders in recognising various gender perspectives
across the EU.
- Assisting Youth in developing skills to initiative self motivated projects at local/international level under the Erasmus+ program.
- Tackling various gender biases. Devising solutions that could be applied in daily lives
and across organisations in order to reduce and eventually eradicate gender bias.
- Initiating the participants with the following skills:
a. Tackling gender issues.
b. Analysing cultural traditions.
c. Understanding the role of people belonging to various genders and their perspectives
across EU societies.
The Training Course (Activity 1) brought together 22 participants and target youth
workers/leaders and young people based in the countries across the European Union (i.e.
Germany, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Estonia) and the neighbouring country of Armenia.
The Training Course was based on methods of non-formal education. The workshops and
activities helped participants to rise up their skills of leadership, tolerance, and
self-awareness. Group-building activities and icebreakers helped participants to create a
strong team atmosphere. Also, the participants had the possibility to make initiatives
and offer different activity ideas and collaborate with the trainers. This ensured the highest
involvement of participants in every stage of the Training. The planned activities and applied
method contributed not only to formal and non-formal learning by participants but also to
their social, cultural, and personal development, as they will get theoretical information and
knowledge concerning the topics, reflected on their own patterns after the processes on
various themes and practice there and then new methods and new ways to transform their
organizations to be more gender responsive and sensitive. Through nonformal education
methods, the participants got to know each other and had the oppurtunity to exchange
experiences and forge new friendships, across any barriers that may exist.
The participants of the Training
Course acquired and improved the following learning outcomes:
● Refraining from Gender Stigmatization: An understanding that the role of the youth
worker is not self-realization but working for youth. In this role, youth workers will
learn not to force people to share their opinion unless it helps them reach their goals.
They also learned to be careful not to jeopardize the high values and basic
principles that they established at the beginning of their work, such as
non-discrimination, transparency, and participation. A main learning outcome is that
just because they are faced with a dissenting opinion does not mean they are allowed
to change their working attitude or become less professional or mistreat the
participants.
● Refraining from Making Gender Assumptions: To refrain from assumptions such as,
for example, referring to a Muslim woman wearing a veil as being repressed or
passive or referring to a person who did not grow up in a family with two parents as
having unhappy childhood. Participants learned how to avoid this.
● Using precise (gender-neutral) language: Each language has its own rules, and every
country has a certain way of dealing with gender-neutral and diversity-oriented words.
The increasing use of gender-neutral language is not only due to political correctness
or simple common decency but also to a spreading movement of emancipation of
oppressed groups in society. The language of youth workers should avoid biased
language and try to achieve a diversity balance instead.
● Empathy towards people with various gender identities and sexual orientations: In
everyday life, we will connect better to others and understand better if we practice
being in others’ shoes if we understand that differences are enriching us, and we can
learn many things from each other. In this project, many exercises will expand
empathy and understanding of others.
● Collaboration: Participants improved their collaboration skills, working
productively in the group and win-win thinking.
● Solution-oriented thinking: Participants increased their creativity in searching for
different solutions to the problems than their habitual ones and gain the tools for
promoting gender equality which are applicable in everyday life. In this project, we
promoted focusing and building the relationship on what works instead of focusing
on what doesn't work.
● Constructive feedback: Participants learned to give constructive feedback to each
other and express themselves honestly whilst avoiding interpretations and judgments.
● Diversity Orientation: The project also increased the diversity-oriented approaches
of participants
I co-designed the activities and led the week's sessions.