TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Peri Kourakli
The aim was to educate young people about the EU institutions and the European Parliament’s processes so to co-develop the youth demands for the new European Parliament.
It was known that young people are feeling very distant from Brussels and the EE institutions, while there are several initiatives that affecting their daily life starting from the youth and employment strategy.
Thessaloniki–European Youth Capital 2014 (TEYC) is running the national campaign on the first vote for the upcoming European Parliament elections which includes interactive youth activities on the topic aiming in the youth participation. Actually, the active participation and the connection of youth (among themselves and among themselves with the rest of the generations) is one of the priorities of the TEYC.
The workshop was targeted to young people representing different players but with common elements in order to have common ground for discussion and interaction. The first element was the city of Thessaloniki, so they represent TEYC, the local civil society (active members of local NGOs) and the university (Aristotle University, School of Journalism and Communication). The second element was the European Youth Capitals, so it included young people from past EYCs (Torino, Italy 2010 and Braga, Portugal 2012) and from a future (Cluj Napoca, Romania 2015).
The workshop was entirely based to non-formal learning. It started with small interactions among the participants in order to introduce themselves to the group (game with names) and to communicate their goals and challenges (visualization game) and it continue with team work (knowledge puzzle, a game of silence and concentration, tasks in groups). It also included web based quizzes and participation to a CEDEFOP event (“Skills and employability: labour market opportunities for youth”) from which they had to decode the messages (small reporters). They also had to propose possible logos for the campaign in which they had to capture the aims and main messages of the campaign and then they had to communicate them by using a creativity mean.
The workshop was successful since the evaluations of the organizing team (simple questionnaire) and the participants (2 visual evaluations) were both positive. It also produced a long list of youth demands which were addressing to the most significant (for the participants) European Parliament’s Committees.
The list, along with the rest of the material of the campaign are uploaded in an E-Book www.goforeurope.gr.
My tasks were extremely complicated and demanding since I am coordinating the entire campaign and this workshop is just a part of the campaign. So I was leading the organizing team of the workshop (tasks from venues and equipment to participants and communication), I facilitate the workshop and also I was the main trainer of the workshop.