TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Nikolina Jureković
The TC aimed to promote intercultural dialogue and provide youth workers, youth leaders and multipliers with tools necessary for raising intercultural awareness and social inclusion. We wanted to develop a greater intercultural
awareness, and provide the participants with the tools necessary to promote intercultural dialogue within their community, which will strengthen the common European values such as respect for diversity, equality, solidarity, openness, understanding and liberty for combating
stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, xenophobia, hate speech and hate motivated violence. We also addressed the needs present throughout Europe for better mutual understanding of cultures, as well for combating stereotypes and prejudice. By providing youth workers with new methods and approaches, as well as with learning-by-doing experience, an increase in quality of youth work will happen occurred which tremendously benefits the youngsters our participants work with, since they are able to transfer knowledge and skills gained.
All of the participants of this project were youth workers, youth leaders or multipliers that encounter in their work with youngsters that are facing issues of exclusion or discrimination on any ground, or are themselves oppressing others. Most of them were coming from areas with high level of prejudice and stereotypes towards others ( either by ethnicity, social background, race etc.). The countries they were coming from were the following: Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey, Poland, Greece, Cyprus and Romania.
Through using non formal learning methods such as workshops, discussions, simulation games and social campaign techniques the P&P TC provided competences, skills and knowledge about stereotypes, prejudice, anti-discrimination, racism and xenophobia in order to take actions for diminishing those negative social phenomena and creating a greater social and community involvement.
There were several considerations that we took in mind while planning this TC. The first one is the typical group dynamics that is found at international activities of such duration and intensity, which means that in the beginning a lot of emphasis will be put on creating a good and safe atmosphere, providing space for the people to get to know each other and build a trust-worthy group, later to enter into an intensive group work process and at the end to also assist a harmonious disassembling of the group. The second consideration is that in the beginning, the input comes mainly from the trainers, during the core part of the TC the main focus lies on the group, and towards the end a big focus is put on reflection and work at individual level. Eventually, some other structuring elements we used were daily reflection groups in the evenings as well as learning diaries every morning to put into written the individual learning points.
We achieved the objectives set out, as follows:
-to raise intercultural awareness and promote ICL dialogue;
-to provide participants with tools and knowledge necessary to combat racism, discrimination and xenophobia in their communities and promote social inclusion
-to focus on how to create new opportunities for young people through NFE in order to develop their transversal skills
-to promote E+: build new partnerships and work on future projects, thereby increase youth participation
-to foster international cooperation and understanding of equality by gaining valuable experience.
We implemented an evaluation at the end of the TC that showed participants were fully satisfied with the implementation of the TC and their learning outcomes.
We implemented another evaluation to measure the impact and it showed that we managed to reach youngsters from deprived areas into engaging in non formal education.
Another result is a follow up project created by the youngsters that were our target group in dissemination phase, and it will be held this year.
Project's documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATfDagKGzBQ
I was a full-time trainer in the activity.
I created the program flow outline, implemented the session and performed evaluation.