TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Elena A. Russo
This project aims at bringng together young people from different cultures and backgrounds in order to exchange and discover more about personal development as a tool for living with awareness and critical thinking socio-political issues carachterizing their societies. The exchange lets young people to consolidate their competence (knowledge, skills and attitudes) but also to have a major awareness of their personal thoughts, emotions and actions. This path on self-awareness translates into more conscious and multi-perspective point of views on today's societies and leads to a detachment of the superficiality of mainstream media, else’s opinion
and judgment while having a big (and manageable) power on people. The intercultural environment of this project, encourage participants to forge links and networks at European level and to enrich themselves from varied experiences, making them realize that there is never a unique and single "Truth".
Group: 36 youth from Algeria, France, , Turkey, Italy, Spain, Greece, including 6 with fewer opportunities.
Team: Senior facilitator (me) and a junior facilitator (an Estonian younger collegue). Project manager and coordinator are French.
NFE according to Kolb's cycle of learning and NAOMIE model.
Each YE day had a special focus: Team Building, Open mind (Out of the box), Responsibility, Judgment, Socio-political issues, Relation with money, Communication and Looking forward.
Specificities of this YE were:
- Empowerment of leaders, fully in charge of certain activities such as reflection groups, teambuilding labs and intercultural evenings.
- Live in a challenging and empowering conditions of 100& contact with nature, including isolation from civilization.
- Create and be part of a community for all the duration of the project, as groupworks took care of the common wellbeing by keeping the working spaces clean and dignified, time-keeping, washing dishes, storing the garbage, supporting each other.
Support wider flexibility and tolerance in the
context of cultural diversity that characterizes our
societies.
• Empower participants’ freedom to think
through personal awareness.
• Learn to develop participants’ ideas about the
society in which they live and communicate it
clearly.
• Bring the idea of acceptance of the diversity of
opinions and maintain a critical approach to the
treatment of information in the framework of the
development of a conscious young European
citizenship.
• Reinforce the communication competence between young people from different cultures.
• Provide a qualitative intercultural experience.
Senior facilitator, agenda designer, report writer