TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Olga Kuczynska
Our aims were
- Improve youth workers self-awareness and competencies (clear, ethic and empathic communication with individuals and groups, healthy relationships management, Non violent communication, face unpredictable situations, stress management,..);
- Enhance the wellness and the self-care of Youth workers focusing on tools and methods preventing burnout and taking in account the person on the intellectual, emotional, mental, physic and spiritual levels;
- Empower participants self-care and empathy to let them embrace care and empathy towards the other- especially towards their young people with problematic backgrounds and difficulties,mainly with those with a violent attitude.
With this project we wanted to create a comfortable and calm space where youth workers, especially those who have faced moments of crisis, burn-out and stress, can reflect on their role, needs and resilience; we wanted also to provide them with deep but practical methods and tools for recovering balance with themselves and with the target groups in their work.
The organisations we partered with are active in the field of youth and education that is one the most affected field of burn-out. It connected with their needs of supporting and building new capacities of handling burnout and wellbeing.
This training aimed at youth workers and educators, trainers that needed to build up their competences regarding self-care and wellbeing connected to burn out prevention. Many participants were active youth workers or volunteers that are directly connected to burn out themselves or someone the work with. We had 7 countries involved: Portugal, Italy, Greece, Macedonia, Ireland, Poland and Romania and each was represented by one organisation. We had 2 trainers, one from Portugal and one from Italy.
Training was based on non formal education principles with an experimental twist of self-awareness building tools. We were following Nonviolent Communication and Transactional Analysis as two main methodologies and both were adapted to the group dynamics and processes, context and the topics of burnout and self-care.
This training gathered a group of youth workers, educators, students, volunteers that were building on their self-care and wellbeing skills to prevent burnouts in them or groups they work with (or will work with).
The evaluation we got indicated the group met their expectations and many plans of multiplying what was learnt were made.
Find here an example of an article published by one participant: http://www.mental8works.pt/2019/09/25/uma-abordagem-nao-formal-ao-burnout/?fbclid=IwAR0O_0YTV-lT7rqDPA5UELRDPeqWq4-6eUP9jixxXQqM58Pc1YwVeJOiptQ (in portuguese)
More outcomes will be uploaded within some time.
I was a full time trainer in this event and was responsbile for all needed tasks from planning the training, assessing needs of participants, building program, facilitating, evaluating and on-going support.
Olga is a very talented trainer, professional and passionate. Her expertise in NVC and empathy are deep and easy at the same time, because of the non-formal methods that she uses. The use of emotions and olistic solicitation makes the learning unforgettable.