TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Gabriel Brezoiu
Aim: help rural young people in MIJARC Europe network and beyond feel that they have the right, the means and the skills to drive change at local level and to motive other stakeholders to support their ideas and create opportunities for youth participation together.
O1: enable young people from rural areas to discriminate between self-imposed barriers to participation (their own perceptions, stereotypes and attitudes) and external barriers and find inspiration to identify solutions to both types of barriers;
O2: teach young people how to communicate with, involve and ask for support from local authorities and perceive them as partners rather than opponents;
O3: empower young people from rural areas to become competent and effective e-citizens;
O4: contribute to the implementation of the principles of the Revised Charter on participation of young people in local and regional life and to the dissemination of the "Have your say manual" to local public authorities and youth NGOs in at least 10 rural areas in Europe.
Young people & youth workers from Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Malta and Armenia.
The training was based on non-formal education methodology including several methods and approaches:
- reaching a common understanding on youth participation (introducing the ladder of participation model);
- presenting the results from the previous activities;
- reflecting and presenting the local realities and the level of participation in their local communities;
- connecting youth participation with youth e-participation;
- exploring the main components of e-participation;
- having practical workshops on how to stay online safe and to be able to e-participate;
- field visit & meeting with experts;
discovering new e-participation tools;
- presenting good practices of e-participation;
creating follow-up plans to be implemented in their local community;
- reviewing and giving feedback on the follow-up activities;
The participants worked in national groups in developing concrete action plans in order to put in practice their experience in the training course. They focused on:
- short-term actions such as GDPR updates, website changes, informing their colleagues in the organisations, newsletters etc.),
- mid-term actions such as workshops, organizational changes, procedural changes and introduction of new platforms in the organization work;
- long term actions answering community needs such as building hospitals, setting up cultural/educational projects etc.;
Corresponding to WPO3, the participants worked together in intercultural subgroups in solving practical case studies through the e-participation tools they have discovered. The case studies they worked on are the following:
young people from the south of France would like to set up a mobile health caravan to pass through the villages that don’t have access to a hospital;
youth organisations from Overisje (Belgium) would like to organize an annual eurovillage festival to increase the participation of the local young people in the cultural field;
a group of young people from a Slovakian village wants to have more transport connections to the nearby town so that they could participate more to the community life;
a group of young people from Zadar (Croatia) would like to submit their application for the European Youth Capital 2020;
As a result of this activity, the participants came up with creative and realistic solutions that would answer to the case studies; they used their own experiences and digital tools in a step-by-step approach in order to tackle the problems envisaged.
Regarding the WPO4, the participants were introduced to the work of Council of Europe in the field of digital youth participation, particularly regarding the Revised charter on participation of young people in local and regional life. Furthermore, they have received access to a hard copy & online copy of the ”Have your say” in order to provide them with new tools and inspiration to get back to their organisations.
I was one of the full time professional trainers involved in the process of preparation, delivery and evaluation of the training course.