TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Jessica Reinsch
The project aimed to introduce upcycling as a tool for empowering entrepreneurial mindset of young people by giving them the opportunity to apply practical skills related to sustainable development in an intercultural environment
Objectives:
• to stimulate the sense of initiative of the participants, to boost their creativity and to improve their entrepreneurial skills by giving new life to discarded materials and by getting in touch with FabLabs and MakerSpaces
• to spread the idea of upcycling as a tool to foster reuse and recycle, thus reducing the environmental impact, by providing several Upcycling and DIY sessions and participating on a public flea market in the last day of the project
• to address environmental awareness and importance of participants and local people in promoting a sustainable way of life
30 participants including trainers team from five countries have been involed in this activity: Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland and Estonia.
The target group:
• people who have graduated mainly in secondary and vocational schools
• people active in the field of youth work
• people with an interest in hands-on activities, practical skills, upcycling and sustainability
The project used non-formal education methods and contained of 3 main phases: preparation, implementation, follow-up.
• Preparation: Questionnaire to collect needs and interests from the targhet group, use of social media beforehand to get in contact and start with input of the topic, APV, little tasks to the group
• Implementation: first two days have been reserved for getting to know each other, expectation exchange and teambuilding; followed by diving into the topic, visiting a local Makerspace, brainstorming on creative upcycling projects, building groups and hands-on activities to build new lamps from discarded materials, the last days have been used for result presentation and dissemination on a local flea market followed by a final evaluation.
• follow-up: participants continued to share topic-related inputs in a social media group, met local stakeholders and requested a second training on that topic
The most obvious and visible results and outcomes were the items that have been upcyled within the group work sessions. Each group managed to came up with at least one new item. Those have been sold on a local flea market. Being present on the flea market helped the participants to interact in a multi-cultural environment and strenghten their self-confidence. During the evaluation session results became visible through NFL methods. Also a follow-up training was requested, applied and finally hold in summer one year later in Germany.
Concept writing, target group needs analysis, contribution to write the project application, programme planning, programme implementation, session facilitation