TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Anton Toshev
The training activity Broad Perspectives aimed to strengthen the capacity of young professionals and youth organisations to effectively prevent, manage, and transform conflicts in youth work settings. The seminar responded to the increasing need for practical, inclusive, and intercultural approaches to conflict resolution in diverse social and cultural contexts across Europe.
The training addressed the need for youth workers to develop concrete tools and competences for dealing with tensions, misunderstandings, and conflicts within multicultural groups, while fostering dialogue, inclusion, and mutual understanding. Through peer learning and the exchange of practices among participants from 11 countries, the activity supported the development of intercultural awareness, empathetic communication, and reflective youth work practices.
The activity aimed to improve participants’ skills in conflict analysis, communication, and mediation, while encouraging critical reflection on their own professional roles and organisational approaches. It also sought to strengthen cooperation between organisations and lay the groundwork for follow-up actions at local and international levels.
Broad Perspectives aligned closely with the goals of the participating organisations by contributing to capacity building in youth work, promoting social inclusion and active citizenship, and reinforcing European cooperation through learning mobility and long-term partnerships.
The activity targeted young professionals and youth workers actively involved in youth organisations, community initiatives, and non-formal education across Europe. Participants were engaged in fields such as youth work, social inclusion, intercultural learning, and conflict resolution, and had prior experience working with diverse groups of young people.
The training brought together participants from 11 European countries: Croatia, Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Czech Republic, Portugal, and Estonia. Each partner organisation was represented by participants involved in the preparatory, seminar, and follow-up phases of the project.
The international team of trainers and coordinators also reflected a multicultural composition, ensuring a diversity of professional backgrounds, perspectives, and cultural contexts. This international composition was a core element of the activity, enabling intercultural learning, peer exchange, and comparative reflection on youth work practices across different national realities.
The diversity of countries and nationalities among both participants and team members ensured that the activity fully met the criteria of an international training activity, as required for inclusion in the TOY portfolio.
The training methods I used were fully based on non-formal education principles, combining experiential learning, creativity, reflection, and practice. The puppet-making process functioned as a creative and embodied learning method, supporting emotional awareness, symbolic thinking, and safe exploration of conflict-related communication patterns.
During the sessions, I applied guided self-reflection, small-group work, and facilitated dialogue, enabling participants to connect personal experiences with professional youth work practice. Role-play and simulation exercises, including puppet-based dialogues, were used to help participants practise recognising judgments, feelings, and needs, and to experiment with alternative, needs-based responses in conflict situations.
The learning process was supported by peer learning methods, encouraging participants to share examples from their own work, reflect together, and learn from different cultural and organisational contexts. Continuous group reflection and feedback moments were integrated to deepen learning and adapt the process to the group’s needs.
Within the broader seminar context, participants and other trainers also contributed by sharing their own tools, methodologies, and practices related to conflict resolution and inclusion. This created a rich learning environment in which my session functioned as a complementary methodological contribution, embedded in a wider exchange of non-formal approaches and professional experiences.
The training activity achieved its aim of strengthening participants’ competences in conflict resolution and inclusive communication within youth work. One of the most visible outcomes was the strong interest in the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) approach introduced and facilitated by me together with Toni Lyubenova. By the end of the seminar, the NVC methodology was identified by participants as one of the most relevant and applicable tools presented during the programme.
The success of the training can be demonstrated by the fact that participants from four partner countries decided to transfer the NVC approach to their local contexts, integrating the methods into their own youth work activities and community initiatives. This clear intention for follow-up and replication indicates both the practical value and the relevance of the methods presented.
Additionally, as part of the local follow-up phase, our organisation Creatosphere implemented and facilitated a public event based on the “Veil of Ignorance” workshop, adapting the seminar learning outcomes to a local community setting. This activity contributed to further dissemination of the project results and reinforced the sustainability of the training impact beyond the international seminar.
The training’s success was also reflected in participants’ active engagement, qualitative feedback, and the integration of shared methodologies into local practice. The seminar and its outcomes are documented through the project’s official communication channels, including the website and social media platforms of Synchro Foundation and partner organisations.
As a trainer, I co-designed and facilitated a non-formal learning session grounded in experiential, creative, and reflective methods inspired by the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) approach. My main task was guiding participants through a hands-on puppet-making process, during which each participant created their own hand puppets representing the jackal and the giraffe, which are key metaphors used in NVC to symbolise reactive, judgment-based communication and needs-based, empathetic communication.
The creative process functioned as an entry point for learning, allowing participants to externalise inner communication patterns and engage with sensitive topics in a safe, playful, and embodied way. Together with my colleague Toni Lyubenova, we introduced the core principles of NVC through interactive input, guided reflection, and facilitated dialogue, focusing on the distinction between observations and evaluations, feelings and pseudo-feelings, needs, and the basics of making clear, conscious requests.
I supported learning through group reflection, short role-plays, and puppet-based dialogues, encouraging participants to experiment with new ways of expressing and hearing messages in conflict situations. My facilitation approach prioritised active participation, emotional awareness, and peer learning over theoretical instruction.