TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Barnabás Gulyás
The aim of Magic Europe youth excahnge was to help youngsters (aged between 15-25) to get acquinted with different topics by sharing experiences and carrying out a social media campaign together. Topics were active participation, citizenship, volunteering, democracy in general. Since there's a tendency of apathy among young people the youth exchange was trying to give answers for other peers of how to be a bit more active citizens in their closer society- community. The host organisation is working in the field of democracy education for 20 years, so it was important for them as well, to maintain their awareness raising activities.
The target group were basically very broad. Anyone could join to the youth exchange who were showing an interest about the topic. A stronger cooperation has been set up together with group leaders, hereby also refers back as representatives from partner organisation. Tasks were shared and divided between group leaders and the trainer's team. The team of trainers included a chief trainer and a junior trainer too, together with a logistic support person.
Applied methods were coming from the field of non-formal education, as well as experiential learning. From basic energizer's there were small group works; adapted word café style to explore topics, and there was also a inputs for setting up a social media capmaign. The group had to work together with the support of trainer's team and group leaders, the have been given a responisibilty to work on their own too.
MAgic Europe youth exchange had a very large number of participants (38) from Azerbaijan, Italy, Spain, France, Estonia, Romania, Hungary, Georgia.
The participants has created the content of the capmaign called Day of Active Citizenship (https://www.facebook.com/DAC8Country/?fref=ts) . By running an online campaign they had chance to summarize their knowledge about the discuseed topics and decide the possible ways how to tansfer messages for a larger community, they have been working together and had chance to feel the team's power when it comes to cooperation.
By the end of the one day capamign, they have reached more than 10.000 thousands people, have translated many different statements into eight languages, took more than 20 pictures, and so on.
I was involved as a chief trainer in this project. I was designing the educational content of the programe together with my collegue Alxendra Vinczi who was the junior trainer. I was full-time trainer during the program.