TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
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Wild Paths to Participation is an immersive training that explores how adventure and outdoor sports can become powerful catalysts for youth engagement in Europe’s inner, rural and mountain areas. Building on the EU Youth Participation Strategy, the training demonstrates how place-based, adrenaline-light experiences — from trekking to cooperative team sports — can amplify young people’s voices, confidence, and sense of belonging while enhancing their mental health.
Objectives
- Introduce adventure-experiential-education and sport-for-development methodologies tailored to low-density territories.
- Strengthen youth workers’ competence in facilitating soft-skills (communication, leadership, resilience) and wellbeing through nature-based activities.
- Exchange inspiring rural participation practices and create transnational peer networks.
- Co-create ready-to-use mini-projects that participants will pilot with young people back home, using Erasmus+ Youth or European Solidarity Corps opportunities.
18 people from Italy, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania
Experiential learning activities, nature-based, adventure-based.
Interactive inputs, micro-lectures, peer coaching and nightly reflection circles ensure everyone learns by doing and make clear links to their rural realities.
Participants leave with:
- A validated adventure-sport session plan adapted to their local context
- A draft Erasmus+ project proposal or community action plan
- Extended rural-youth peer network and access to a resource pool of tools, checklists and facilitation guides
- Follow-up coaching (online) will be provided during the first three months of project implementation
I was the senior trainer, I managed every logistical and educational aspect and, at the same time, mentored the junior trainer with me
He was the best trainer I have ever worked with. Really amazing and full of knowledge and inspirational words