TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Simona Navadonskyte
The project’s main objectives were:
- Integrating the emotional dimension into youth education: equipping youth workers with tools to recognize and address experiences such as fear, powerlessness, anxiety, and frustration, transforming them into resilience.
- Developing an intersectional approach: helping young people interpret global conflicts and crises by linking various forms of oppression and strengthening a sense of solidarity.
- Transforming emotions into action: showing young people that they are not helpless spectators but part of a transnational network capable of concrete actions and local micro-commitments.
- Stimulating creative and collective expression: using artistic, theatrical, and narrative practices to translate emotional experiences into shared languages and communicative outputs.
- Cultivating a connection with nature and the living world: strengthening the link between individual well-being and social and ecological justice through outdoor methodologies and anti-speciesist approaches.
- Leveraging play as a transformative practice: introducing gamification elements and developing a “play manifesto” as an exploratory and self-reflective tool capable of fostering awareness and participation.
- Producing replicable tools: compiling methodologies and practices into a toolkit that can be used beyond the project’s lifespan by partners and other European youth organizations.
The training course gathered 24 educators from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Georgia.
Methods used: open-air installation, nature wondering, Work that Reconnects methodology, documentary, community circles, acroyoga, permaculture, Theater of Oppressed, play manifesto & others.
The activity supported youth workers in developing a more holistic approach to working with young people facing complex social and ecological realities. Participants explored how emotions can be acknowledged as a source of resilience and transformed into meaningful action, while using intersectional, creative, nature-based and playful methodologies to foster solidarity, participation and connection with the living world. The mobility also resulted in practical, replicable methods and tools that participants and partner organisations can continue using in their youth work beyond the project.
I was a facilitator in a team of 3. Besides that, I also helped with the international coordination of this project.