Partnership Building

Aims & objectives

- Analyzing types and principles of partnership building necessary to organize a successful European Youth Capital initiative;
- How to bring together organizational capabilities and human resources in the form of skills, experiences and ideas beyond the capacity of a single organization;
- Types of partnerships to be developed to prepare and implement an EYC.

Target group & international/intercultural composition of the group & team

Target groups:
- Representatives of Eurpean Youth Capital (EYC) teams that are in the process of implementing or have implemented an EYC initiative. Partner countries were Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Romania;
- Representatives of the local youth sector of Varna directly involved in / supporting the application of the city for EYC 2017 and its implementation.

Training methods used & main activities

- Interactive sharing of good practices
- Mapping of own youth reality in each city
- Mentoring process from more experienced to less experienced participants
- City missions for exploring surroundings from partnership point of view
- Group work and creative tasks
- Presentations and discussions
- Group and self-reflection

Outcomes of the activity

Participants had the chance to explore and map their youth realities in each city from partnership building and potential point of view. They participated in a lot of networking activities to raise the opportunities for real partnership building within the group. Together with the trainers team they checked the meaning and measures of partnership in the European youth sector meaning and tried to align it with their local / oragnisational reality. At the end of the training each group had to make a plan for improving their partnership capacity builsing at local / organisational level.

Your tasks and responsibilities within the team

As the training is part of an overall training programme, part of the YiA Action 4.6 Project "Youth Capitals in Action", I have participated in the initial process of developing the project application and the training programme with its 5 trainings.
Within this third training we have been two trainers developing the training programme together, participating in all the sessions and delivering training activities as full time trainers. The group was over 30 participants which required strong training presence. I have been full-time-trainer in the following activities:
- Official openning of the training and reconnecting participants
- building the youth map of each EYC city
- presenting and analysing EYC cities youth maps
- partnership building basics at European youth level
- partnership building activities
- working on the canvases model of partnership building within EYC initiative
- networking and its connection with partnership building
- meeting with the international group of Black Sea countries Youth Councils and exploring the partnership opportunities
- making a partnership building plan at local / organisational level
- presenting final gorup works and closing the training

I worked on this training for 5 days days as a full time trainer.