TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Tatsiana Petrachkova Bauder
The activity aimed to empower personal and professional development of young people through discovering the potential of common tools of culture and expression; to raise awareness among the young people of the power in the audiovisual language and particularly the potential of emphasizing their own voice as individuals and taking part in building a better future for their home communities.
Needs that it addressed were overcoming perceived difficulties in expression of opinion and participation, as well as strengthening of young people's self confidence, critical thinking, creativity and courage to raise the painful topics of their respective social environments. They dealt with the question of differences and similarities between the cultures and worked together to bring their own interests together and interpret their own ideas, dreams and plans in context of modern Europe.
Proqvi actively promotes innovation in personal empowerment both in terms of tools and methodologies, and in terms of active citizenship and participation. This particular project astonished us with the effect it had on young people's honest and open contribution to the discussions, audiovisual production and interpersonal communication, as well as their dedication to the method of co-creation and peer support.
The target group were young people of different social, educational and cultural backgrounds, both men and women from in Sweden, Italy, Poland, Romania, UK, Lithuania and Turkey. We aimed to bring maximum diversity into the project group in order to make common grounds more obvious, and we succeeded.
co-creation methodology implies active participation of the young people, starting from formulation of the agenda and further, to forming working groups and deciding the schedule. In order to facilitate this, there were 4 workshops held daily: team work assignment, technical competence lift, creative/inspirational challenge and communication quest. Further, the work was organized in order to give youngsters space and opportunity to implement their ideas in short movies, working as a production team. Separate facilitation was provided for production and professional (certain role in the production team) groups. Additional trainings were organized to cover participants' needs for quality of their group projects like, for example, media training, journalism and process planning.
During the activity there were 6 short movies produced, each one featuring one of dimensions of Volunteer Exile: the topic that participants chose by themselves. However, it is not the very final production that gives me joy and satisfaction of success. What made this project outstanding, was the power of cohesion that young people developed and demonstrated within just a couple of days, which allowed them to support each other in both articulating painful personal issues outloud, and in production of the audiovisual material (much of it is defined by the very participants and 16+ due to shocking and aggressive images). The project's outcomes are both the movies themselves (one of them can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPmZEHWt9x8) and the back stage material (example of one of them can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAQ1i5TI4Po&t=456s).
I had both the responsibilities as organizer and a trainer, dealing both with the practical issues, interpersonal and group communication, organization of the schedule and personally facilitating the sessions, except those for technical competence and media process organization that were provided by my Turkish colleague.