Empowering Youth-Strengthening communities is a 9 days (except the traveling days) training course designed for 29 youth workers, leaders in 11 organizations from Europe. The training will be held in Cluj Napoca, European Youth Capital for 2015, Romania between 1-11 October 2015.
The project is funded by European Union through Erasmus Plus Program.

Through this project we want to empower youth workers and young leaders to direct and control their own lives and to actively participate in the life on the organization and community. Furthermore, we want to empower them to actively deliver programs for young people and to participate in the governance and decision making of their organization. Through empowerment, the young people are able to transform their lives. For transformation, the young people organize themselves and self organization leads to create a caring, responsible and safe space in order to create fulfillment.

Partners:YMCA Netherlands, YMCA Gabrovo – Bulgaria, YMCA Tirana – Albania, YMCA England, YMCA Italia, YMCA Poland, YMCA Serbia, YMCA Ukraine, YMCA Spain, YMCA Setubal – Portugal.

Objectives:
– to improve the skills and key competences of young leaders and youth workers, to develop intercultural dialogue and to promote social inclusion through learning mobility of those actively involved in youth work and youth organizations, by strengthened links between youth field and labor market;
– to foster the quality improvements in youth work through enhanced cooperation between youth organization and other stakeholders
– to enhance the international dimension of youth activities and the role of youth workers and organizations as support structures complementarily with EU`s external action, in particular through the promotion of mobility and cooperation between organizations from Program countries and Partner countries and international organizations and through targeted capacity building in Partner countries.

In our training we will focus on tools and skills. Skills can only be developed and matched to job needs when they are specific. To specify them, and identify the strengths, we need to experience, practice them, and ask ourselves how we think, feel and act in situations that are similar to those we can have at a workplace.
We will make a direct link in youth participation, engagement, volunteering and development of employability skills and how a program delivered by an organization could help the increase those skills.
The media component focuses more on developing practical skills that will be useful both for the partner organization and for each participant for personal or professional purpose.

Purpose of the training is to improve personal and professional competences in order to create the impact on:
• Skills improvement of youth workers in handling social and cultural differences, cooperation, teamwork, responsibility, communication, trust, openness, listening, self-expression, initiative, creativity, handling unexpected events, motivation, expressing values in action and other employability skills
• Experiencing how a competence-focused learning process works and understanding how such processes can be integrated in youth work and youth participation and non-formal learning
• Introduction of YouthPass as a tool in international youth work and how can be used in labor market
• Creating the base and providing info for future networking and the creation of common projects within the Erasmus Plus frame
• Creating a synergy of ideas and actions throughout Europe –impacting and transforming lives of young people

Methods used: experiential learning with various indoor and outdoor activities, such as lectures, simulation, discussions, sharing, debrief, intercultural workshops, digital media workshops, problem-solving and team-building tasks, reflections, peer to peer education, basic coaching, self learning.
We will empower participants to create results beyond imagination, work out of excellence through taking risks and correcting mistakes, try out ´learning by experience´ method , actions back at home.

Employability, creating quality and bringing changes into life and the lives of the young people that we serve all over Europe, means of becoming more competitive and employable on the labor market. Not only the participants will get the opportunity to share ideas and experience with each others, but learn a number of tools and techniques of increasing competitiveness and self-esteem, as well as acquire knowledge applicable in real life by means of creative workshops and activities related to the topic through volunteering programs and active involvement in the organizations and community.

Infoletter:

Application form: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SWPQ27W