TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Roi Guitián
This capacity building gathered a group of staff members and volunteers from IVS organizations from Europe and Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Togo, Hungary, Spain, UK, France, Italy, Belgium):
1) Fostering among IVS organisations communication skills, including digital storytelling and media production.
2) Analysing and work to improve the communication strategy of the participant organizations
3) Bringing strategic and technical support for the production of stories for the IVS webdoc, which was created in January 2018 and will be the starting point of a communication campaign from February to October 2018.
4) Increasing awareness about the importance of an inclusive and no patronising communication.
5) Promoting positive narratives about volunteering and intercultural exchanges.
6) Supporting the media creation process that they had to develop during their partnership in MediAfrica (the final outcome was a collective webdoc made of their contributions)
This 5 days training was part of MediaAfrica, project that aimed to increase the communication skills as well as to promote positive and no patronising narratives about volunteering between Europe and Africa.
MediAfrica was a project coordinated by Solidarité Jeunesses (France) and had 2 trainings and one seminar during one year. Trainers were Adeline Praud, photographer (France), Miki Ambrozy, traine (Hungary), María Lobo, journalist (Spain) and myself (filmmaker, Spain).
Participants were coming were staff members and volunteers of organizations working in IVS from Europe and Africa.
As the project was aimed to encourage young people to join the voluntary service, all the volunteers that participated in these trainings were aged 18-30 years old. Also, organizations staff that participated were almost all of them under 30. The target of the project were young people so we encouraged organizations to involve young people into their communication teams.
As trainers, we chose a learning-by-doing methodology, an approach which is used, both, in formal and non-formal education. It means learning of knowledge/skills through real based experience. In that case, we were addressing a non-formal training on communication: how to raise awareness campaign, positives narratives, volunteering core values… This could be done in many different ways. In our case, being a non formal training, we set challenges they had to solve in small teams. Through this process they learn knowledge (even technical) but because they demand it to solve an issue.
As this training was also aimed to be the trigger for a collective Media Creation. Then, we started by introducing design thinking methods to share one specific storyline about the webdoc and also took some time on deconstructing stereotypes. On the overall, different activities these days followed this steps:
1. We watch/read/listen to some production of others.
2. We debrief together: objectives, audience, impact, narrative, team, budget…
3. We go into practice: creating our own production (fitting the specific format, according to what we are working in that point - script, podcast, press release...)
4. We review: peer-to-peer reviews, afterwards trainers feedback.
5. We summarize: theory or references, if necessary.
At the end, all of the participants had elaborated in small groups some productions like podcast and shortfilms, which were showed the last day. Some of the became part of the “RoundTripVolunteering” WebDoc, some were just a starting point for another project or just a practice, but all participants gained new skills on media creation through active learning.
) Blog : https://ivsmediafrica.tumblr.com/
2) Webdoc:
https://roundtripvolunteering.com/
3) Some evaluation inputs:
"Thank you so much for these days of creativity and interaction. You made us achieve and create things that we would probably not have tried or done otherwise. Plus, I feel like you reallly "got us".
"Really great and intense training. I feel like I learned a lot and there were really great teachers. Definitely feeling inspired to make content!"
"Spectacular and it was a great platform that made a big difference"
I was involved in Mediafrica project from the beginning as member of the trainers team. I was also during the steering committee meeting for addressing and discussing issues related with the media output and it’s relation with the trainings.
Some specific tasks were:
- Communication guidelines: how to define our messages. Strengths and challenges.
- Filmmaking: editing with smartphones, both videos and podcasts.
- Participatory media creation
- Documenting the process: uploading contents to the blog and guiding the participants while posting in social media.
- Photography: visual documentation of the training.