TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Daniele Nubile
The ewoca³ project is promoted by IBB e.V. and it fosters international youth work addressed to young people with fewer opportunities. The project aims also to professionalize organisations and youth workers in that particular field.
This training is part of the supporting measures that IBB e.V. offers to the 45 organisations involved in the network, most of those at their first international experience. The TC, financed also through the Erasmus+ programme, was addressed to project managers and coordinators that had to plan and coordinate 15 trinational youth encounters.
Those projects are addressed to disadvantaged youngsters and require, since the first phase of planning, commitment and particular attention. The TC aimed to answer to these needs, giving to the participants useful guidelines, methods and inputs.
Topics dealt during the TC were:
- Project management in intercultural settings;
- Interculture, gender and diversity;
- Education to sustainable development;
- Fundraising (incl. Erasmus+) and financial issues;
- Refugees and minority;
- Conflict resolution;
- Legal issues.
The ewoca³ network involves 45 other organisations, beyond IBB e.V., from 17 different European countries, that are: Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Belarus and Estonia.
Each organisation sent to the TC the participant that was going to be involved in the project as responsible persons.
The diverse experience and background of the participants attending to this training activity required particular attention during the planning and implementation phases in order to answer to the different needs present within the group.
In doing so, the programme and the activities were designed keeping in mind the particular target group of the final youth encounters but also the competences in the group of participants during the sessions.
At the beginning of the training course, after simple name-games and small activities aimed to get know each other and making the participants more close to the idea of non-formal education, the focus was centred on the group through different team-building exercises.
Workshops and moments of brainstorming in smaller groups were introduced, in order to enable the sharing of competences among the participants.
Simulation games were then used to get deep into the most sensitive topics of the TC, including moments of reflections and debriefing.
Some frontal inputs were necessary to introduce some legal frames, visual evaluation methods were also used.
The training activity succeeded in giving the 45 project managers and coordinators the tools, the competences and the skills for planning successfully their youth encounters addressed to disadvantaged youngsters in a sustainable way, both on the financial aspect but also on the content-related level.
The 15 trilateral international partnership, forming the ewoca³ network, are still working together and, additional value, some of the organisations are now creating new projects, exploring the different possibilities offered by Erasmus+ and other funding programmes.
As a member of the team of trainers, we planned and designed the programme for the activity. During its implementation, we all introduced topics or proposed activities. We facilitated brainstorming sessions, proposed and facilitated workshops or sessions of reflections and moderate discussions. Furthermore, when needed, we also counselled participants individually or in groups.