TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Eleni Kardamitsi
This training course is part of Mind your Mind, a Strategic Partnership project, born from the need to address wellbeing issues affecting european youngsters, namely the excessive use of technological devices and the lack of contact with the natural environment.
On one hand, the urge for a quick access to content and the continuous stimulation generates phenomena knew as “continuous partial attention”, which interferes with focus, concentration and decision making. The development of a dependent use of technology has important consequences: being linked to the undermining of human relations, creativity and academic performance. On the other hand, numerous studies have shown the importance of interacting with nature, especially for the improvement of young people health and wellbeing. In Europe, the contact with nature is decreasing more and more, due to several factors, even determining a so called “nature deficit disorder”. Nature has been demonstrated to increase capacity for concentration, self-control, stress reduction and emotions management. Moreover, even though the role of mindfulness and nature-based methods has been fully recognized, a combination of the two methods is lacking at the European level.
The project “Mind your Mind” aims to contribute to solve these issues in an innovative way, developing new tools able to combine in a synergic way mindfulness techniques and nature-based methods. The main aim is, thus, “to contribute to the youth work community with innovative and inclusive non-formal education tools of high quality based on the synergetic combination of mindfulness and nature-based methodologies”.
The target group was youthworkers and trainers from Spain, Italy and Greece.
We used nature-based methods and mindfulness practices.
By nature-based methods we don’t mean environmental education, although they can hold an educative value in terms of raising awareness regarding our ecosystems. By nature-based methods we mean a type of outdoors activities that happen in a natural environment and that make active use of nature as a central element of the activity not just a pleasant frame. These include games, gymkhanas, orientation, hiking, animal-gazing, mushroom gathering, plants identification, stargazing, etc.
Using nature as a central element for non formal education with youngsters is supported by science. There is ample research confirming that contact with nature increases mental the development of health, psychological and sense of belonging. Benefits include stress reduction, a sense of coherence and belonging, improved self-confidence and self-discipline, creativity, stress alleviation and a broader sense of community (see http://cort.as/wgjO, http://cort.as/wgjT).
Mindfulness is a set of methods focused on learning how to more effectively manage attention. It allows to stay in the present moment, with complete attention and acceptance. It offers a greater sense of well-being and fullness, through attention-management exercises, self-awareness, observation, meditation, body awareness or sensory perception.
The participants received:
-new tools and methods on the combination of nature-based activities and mindfulness
-international collaboration&networking
-experiential learning on the benefits of the connection to nature and the practice of mindfulness
-opportunity to create their own workshops on the topic of the TC
-support & feedback on the creation of their own projects
My role was to:
-coordinate the work between the team of the trainers
-support the participants' learning journey
-make sure that the goals of the project are met while the needs of the participants are nurtured
-provide workshops on goal setting, teambuilding and evaluation
-contribute to the closing ceremony
Eleni was part of the organising team and facilitated part of the program. Always engaged, it's a pleasure working with her!