Between 12-18 June 2017, our representatives – youthworkers Alina Pop and Zoltan Mica – participated in Busteni to the training course about strategic planning and oganizational development called Do it for the Youth.
Youth workers from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Slovenia, Turkey, Poland, Portugal,Romania came together in this project organized by Fundatia Alaturi de Voi and funded by European Commission through Erasmus Plus Program.

The aim of the project is to improve the capacity of youth workers for:
• developing competences to create, develop and improve their NGO’s organizational development strategies (DOS) through participatory approaches;
• improve competences to implement the action plan of the DOS (the resources involved and specific steps you need to do in order to achieve the strategic development objectives formulated in DOS);
• increased commitment and involvement in the development of the organizations, beyond the activities that they are in charge of;
• creating awareness among partner NGOs and other local NGOs concerning the importance of strategic planning and the positive impact generated by it of done through participatory approaches.

The trainers – Mihaela Amariei and Andreea Buzec – took the participants into a journey that started with YouthPass Island (discovering the 8 competences), discovering organizational structure-archetypes, revealing the trends that affect NGSs, trends in human resources, in technology. Through the Why I am here exercise we reflected about our individual motivation and contribution, understanding that strategic planning is not only about organization but also about the people involved in the team.Further we discovered our leadership style, acknowledging the difference between situational leadership and adaptive leadership. We continued with critical thinking and especially lateral thinking, with the Theory of Edward de Bono, the group work exercise experienced on a specific topic the 6 thinking hat method.

We understood the difference between adaptive and technical challenge reflecting on what practices are core to the future and what are obstacles, developing and testing new practices and integrating the new practices by designing how they fir in the organization.
In working groups we experienced appreciative inquiry method on our organizational specific situation passing through all phases: discovery, dream,design, destiny.
In the last part of the training we made the action plan for the next period, how to implement the knowledge gained in this training in our organization and concluded with the evaluation of the training.

” This training course was very helpful for us to gain new tools and experience new participatory methods in creating strategic planning as our organization will start this year the process of creating the new strategy for the next 5 years. The competences developed during this course – knowledge, skills development and attitudes – we will put it is practice immediately in the next meetings with our team, leaders, camp animators, in planning and evaluating activities. Useful was also the sharing that was fostered during the sessions, knowing different organizations and structures gave new perspectives, new reflective points for further development” – Alina Pop.

in the next 4 months we will have the follow up phase with the actions implemented by each partner organizations, an e-seminar to share the results and everything will be packed together is a guidebook.