TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Gabriella Nagy
The event was a networking activity aiming to bring together new and experienced organisations interested in new fields of volunteering and in joining the European Solidarity Corps community.
Objectives:
- Create a frame for sharing experience in the field of volunteering
- Discuss and understand the concept of Solidarity
- Explore new fields of volunteering
- Motivate the organisations to join the European Solidarity Corps community
- Support networking between organisations and encourage them to establish trans-national projects
The project had 2 phases.
In the first phase, in 2020, a 5 day long online event was realised with the participation of 13 participants from the following countries: Lithuania, Italy, Turkey, Tunisia, Finlad, Greece, Egypt, Spain, Georgia, Hungary, Palestine.
In the second phase, a residential of 3 working days was realised, integrated by 2 online sessions, one before and one after the event. Here we worked with a new group, composed of 14 partcipants from 9 countries (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Romania, Finlad, Hungary. Serbia).
The programme was based on the principles of non-formal learning. The methods were interactive and participatory. There was space for participants to share thier experience; the programme included also field visits/guest visits.
The course was integrated by online materials created in the HOP platform: https://hop.salto-youth.net/course/view.php?id=56
Phase 1: In our view and according to the participants’ evaluation the objectives of the event have been generally fulfilled. The one that was achieved with the highest scores according to the evaluation forms was “to be motivated to join or to further engage with ESC volunteering”. The possibilities for sharing, networking and collaborating were also appreciated by participants (to the extent possible with a small number of active participants). Though it was not a training course, significant learning took place, too, and participants’ understanding of ESC increased.
Phase 2: According to the team’s observations and the evaluation forms, the event did reach its
objectives (being asked about each objective, all participants agreed or strongly agreed that
they were reached - see below section “Participants’ evaluation”). Participants shared experiences about volunteering, explored the concept of solidarity, learnt about and got inspired as to ESC, and networked and connected with each other. As to the networking aspect, for the few very experienced participants the event could have been even more fruitful if there was a better balance between experienced organizations and newcomers (among the 14 participants only 5 had a Quality Label). The group feeling was very high, with a lot of bonding and mutual support (which is still going on in an online form after the event).
I was a full right trainer in both phases, together with Konstantinos Spatiotis from Greece.