TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Nika Bunziak
Therefore, the aim of this project was to give the opportunity for youth leaders from different backgrounds to reflect on diversity, intercultural and inter-religious dialogue through fairy tales, to experience different methods of non-formal education in order to raise awareness about human rights and encourage developing soft skills needed in their personal and professional life. Regardless of which countries we come from, we all come from childhood.
The objectives were:
- to raise awareness about European values and to help them to become more sensitive towards the actual global challenges;
- to promote inclusion, diversity, equality, solidarity, empathy and tolerance and to foster intercultural understanding between people of different origins;
- to equip young leaders with knowledge and tools about creative thinking, storytelling, public speaking, teamwork and other soft skills through non-formal methods of education;
- to create space for sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas with the atmosphere of common understanding between peers representing different cultures and backgrounds.
to promote different youth opportunities.
- create a street action, which displays the value of diversity, multiculturalism and reflection on human rights.
Direct target group: youth leaders from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Georgia. Participants’ profile included following criteria:
- to be interested in the main topic of the project;
- creative, open-minded young people, who are willing to actively participate in the whole duration of the project and want to meet different cultures; between 16-26 years old for participants;
- to be able to communicate in English;
- the participants must reside in the country they represent, independently of their citizenship.
Ethnic groups, religion, sexual orientation or political opinions were not taken into account, because the participants were chosen according to his/her motivation. Some participants were participants with fewer opportunities (social obstacles, economic obstacles, educational difficulties, cultural differences, geographical obstacles).
Our project was based on non-formal and informal learning processes and on voluntary participation (based on motivation). We had a lot of activities aimed at getting to know each other: name games, ice breakers, interesting facts of life. Also, a separate block were devoted to team building activities, since we want the group to feel as one team, and not just as a group of people gathered together. We talked about the project itself - what are its goals and objectives, as well as about what fears, expectations and contributions participants have and what can we do about it.
Our sessions on diversity, critical thinking, human rights and youth participation allowed us to go deeper into the theoretical basis of the project. A session about local activity allowed us to plan how to use this knowledge in practice through the street action. It is very important that every day we had an evaluation and we understood how the wave of the project was moving, what kind of group dynamics, what to add or change.
We plan to measure the number of successfully completed local projects within our community, thanks to this project. We are also confident that the participants in our project had a chance to develop soft skills that will allow them to fulfill themselves. As for the partner country, Georgia, for which human rights are a difficult issue, we have measured the number of interested young people on the FB and their activity before and after the project.
The impact of the project will be felt at the European level by promoting European values, that's why we are planning to carry out more activities aimed at regional cooperation between our countries, as well as support to partner countries. We think that such Youth Camp on Human Rights can be sustainable and held every year with a focus on various relevant topics, for example, democracy, diversity, tolerance, LGBTQ+ rights etc. The project is expected to provide reliable network of organizations for further cooperation, development and implement projects of a qualitatively new level in future.
Full-time trainers' work: preparation, implementation, follow up, evaluation. Sometimes coaching, facilitation and mentoring. Interaction with participants, co-trainer and project team. Adaptation of the Program, according to group dynamic and learning needs of the participants.