Building Bridges

Aims & objectives

Training aimed to equip youth workers with deeper understanding of peace and reconciliation processes, elements and strategies. It built competencies of youth workers to promote peace, inter-cultural and inter-religious dialog, against violence, discrimination and hate speech. Through this training youth workers were empowered to engage in the complex topics of peacebuilding and peacekeeping, conflict
transformation, anti-discrimination and intercultural learning/dialogue providing them with necessary skills, attitudes and knowledge.

Target group & international/intercultural composition of the group & team

The training team consisted of two trainers from Serbia and me from Finland. The 8 participants came from Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Turkey.

The amount of participants was significantly reduced mainly by last minute cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemia.

Training methods used & main activities

The training was based on non-formal learning methods empowering the participants to engage themselves with the topics through discussions, simulations, group tasks, self reflection and activities like 5 similarities, Prejudice train, Blue sky thinking up to 100 ideas and Community mapping walk.

Outcomes of the activity

The participants of the training produced their own action plans to be implemented after the training course. The training also produced set of different materials that were shared between the participants and their organizations. Some of the work was also documented in the Discord -platform of the Peace Innovation Lab -project to be shared with other participants of the project.

Your tasks and responsibilities within the team

I was one of the three full-time trainers responsible of planning, implementing and reporting the training course.

I worked on this training for 6 days as a full time trainer.