Words Between the Lines

Aims & objectives

Aim: to equip youth workers with theoretical awareness and practical experience within the competence area “communicating meaningfully with others”, thus addressing attitudes, behaviours, knowledge, and skills directly related to fostering empathy, emotional awareness, and solidarity in their interactions with young people and their communities.

Objectives:
- Develop empathy: to help participants understand and apply empathy mechanisms in both personal and professional settings through artistic methods of expression;
- Enhance emotional awareness: to build participants’ ability to recognise, regulate, share and reflect on their emotions in a group, being able to distinguish their own biases and stereotypes;
- Promote transparent communication: to encourage honest and clear expression of thoughts while respecting others;
- Foster safe spaces: to enable youth workers to create environments (online and offline) where participants feel safer and truly accepted;
- Encourage solidarity: to guide participants in recognising and acting on opportunities to demonstrate solidarity and support.

Target group & international/intercultural composition of the group & team

The group composed of 25 youth workers from Belgium, Ukraine, Finland and Portugal.
The team of organisers were from Belgium and 2 trainers from Ukraine

Training methods used & main activities

- Icebreakers;
- Group-building;
- Experiential learning;
- movement-based facilitation;
- self-directed learning;
- reflection groups;
- peer-to-peer;
- storytelling, theatre;
- role play;
- Group rituals;
- Rotational exchange (marketplace / World Café style)...etc

Outcomes of the activity

Learning Outcomes:
- Being more aware of emotion-related mechanisms and more competent in implementing new approaches, working with young people;
- Identifying various ways to express and act on solidarity, including digital contexts;
- Becoming capable of creating emotionally supportive and inclusive spaces;
- Recognising the importance of reflective tools and how to use them effectively in the learning process of young people;
- Raising awareness of empathy mechanisms and their role in meaningful communication.

Your tasks and responsibilities within the team

I worked on the training from scratch - formulating objectives, designing the programme and methods to facilitating the training course itself with the other trainer.

I worked on this training for 5 days as a full time trainer.