TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Irem Ebru Kuru
The aim of the training is to help young people to develop their skills and promote volunteering as a means to overcome the problems of youth unemployment in Europe.
The objectives are:
• Encourage young people to participate actively in the community as a volunteer
• Focus on developing the competences of young people and introduce the relevant tools
• Support young people to develop their communication, leadership, entrepreneurship and organisational skills
• Help young people to take responsibility
• Raise awareness on youth voluntarism
• Introduce Youthpass and Youth Work Portfolio
There were 30 participants from Poland, Italy, Romania, Latvia, Spain, Macedonia and Turkey.
The methods I used are: Name games, team building games, icebreakers, discussions on cliches and definitions of volunteering, self-reflection, group works outside to inverview people about volunteering, lecture about EVS and other volunteering programs: EU Aid Volunteering and UN Volunteering, discussions on real life EVS stories, excursions to the NGOs, public and private institutions which offers volunteering, simulations on youth project designing.
There are two big outcomes of the training course:
1. Participants got an active role on promoting volunteering in Ege University by organising Youth Info Day. Some of the participants, who were also a former EVS volunteer, gave a lecture about their volunteering experience in the conference hall. Some of them were living library and they gave information about EVS, Youthpass, Europass, UN Volunteering, EU Aid Volunteering and Interrail. Two of them were responsible for designing flyers on their computers and they distributed them to the students. The rest of the participants prepared two big banners and jumped into the classrooms and gave very short information about volunteering and invited them to our info-desks in front of the conference hall. There were also other organisations and institutions which are working with the volunteering activities in Youth Info Day at Ege University.
2. In the last day of the training, the participants had a chance to generate their own youth project on volunteering.
I was the trainer.