TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Olga Kuczynska
The project was a training course that aimed to empower youth workers with methodologies that reflect values and beliefs fitting to the always progressing and mutating multicultural Europe. The methodologies were design and tested to be experienced by participants and are transmitted so that they can be adaptable in order to be reproduced at local level.
The main objectives of the project are:
- Improve youth workers’ skills with practical tools and experiential non-formal activities on conflict, conflict management, prejudice and migration issues;
- Improve youth work quality and enhance the role of youth workers and NGOs as social facilitators spreading European values and a culture of peace;
- Develop competencies and skills directly linked to positive conflict management like empathy and remembrance;
- Enhance the participants’ attitude in transforming conflict situations into reflection and learning opportunities;
- Develop competencies on non-violent behaviours
- Share among youth workers and partners concerns about issues of conflict, conflict management, migration and prejudice, exchange good practices and tools;
The organisations involved in this training assessed their needs before and the objectives were build upon what they requested as need for their staff or volunteers to acquire.
We aimed to have youth workers and volunteers of youth related ngo's in this training and we put big importance of participants with fewer opportunities due to:
- Social obstacles and exclusion;
- Geographic obstacles and isolation;
- Cultural differences;
- Refugees;
- Financial obstacles;
We had participants from Portugal, Ukraine, Italy, France, UK, Spain, Jordan, Norway and Cyprus. Some of the participants were residents of those countries but with different nationalities as we were open for migrants and refugees.
The training was largely built around the simulation exercise "Mission Z: One last chance", which is a game-based exercise developed as part of a KA2-project (and highlighted as a 'Success Story'). Leading up to the exercise, we ran a number of brainstorming activities to establish definitions, and provide some input relevant for the training. In subsequent sessions of the programme we had, among other things, more exercises to process the learning points of the simulation - some of which were gamified.
Other big part of the program was based on the Non Violent Communication and Empathy as tools for the positive conflict management.
This training was a great success and its outcomes and follow up shows it. Not only we spend a week to build up peace and conflict transformation competence with a group of youth workers and volunteers but we aimed to give them tools to transfer this further and give back to their local communities. We collected written report that could be found under this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GZiKKE9X-cP3S0glp7VOam9nuZG2GW1KXEEmE5DiAS8/edit?usp=sharing
I was one of trainers in the team, facilitated number of the sessions focusing mostly on Non Violent Communication and working with concepts of peace and power and with conflict analysis.
Olga delivered her sessions with enthusiasm and professionalism. Her contribution had a great impact on participants learning process.