Managing the young people during a project

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Creating safety

Especially in the beginning of the project it's essential to create safety for the young people participating. Take care of a full programme and be clear about how the days are structured. Don't make young people hanging around for hours on the arrival day of the Youth Exchange. Don't leave the European Voluntary Service-volunteer with a lot of free time during the first days. Offer activities that help the young people to communicate, that take away the language fear, that help them to explore the environment. Personal talks between young people and supervisor can help them to understand the chaos coming from all the different experiences.

Being in a new environment means finding new ways to survive. The programme should help the young people to find those new ways.

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Time for reflection and evaluation

Plan time for reflection and evaluation. For the young people this is an intensive experience and they need space to deal with all the emotions and confusion they may go through. Make time at the end of every day in a Youth Exchange to sit together in groups and to exchange the experiences. It helps to see that others went through similar experiences as you did. Expressing your emotions is already a big first step in dealing with those feelings. Just to have the opportunity to blow off steam is a good reason to have those daily reflections.

Take care that there is time and space available for individual reflection with those young people who need that kind of personal attention.

As referred to earlier, for the individual European Voluntary Service volunteer it is even more important to have a place and a moment to share all the new experiences and impressions. Certainly in the first week of the project it is needed to have daily meetings with the mentor to express feelings and to go through all the simple and practical things that occur when you start to live in another country. Later in the project the frequency will be less and the focus will be more on the learning process of the volunteer.

Reflection and evaluation are important tools to make the learning complete. Just going through all kind of experiences does not necessarily lead to learning if you don't have the opportunity to reflect on these experiences.

There is a big variety of methods that can help you to look back on the day or a certain part of the programme with a group of young people. Just to sit down and talk can sometimes be a good solution but in other moments you might need a more active method as for instance The Living Dartboard.

• More of these methods you can find in the SALTO Toolbox for Training. The below mentioned exercise is based on the following tool: www.salto-youth.net/find-a-tool/281.html

Excercise: The Living Dartboard

The Living Dartboard is a variation on the dartboard you can find in pubs. You need an empty, rather big room. In the middle of the room is an object (chair, paper, flower etc.), which has the same function as the centre of a dartboard.

In this case: the more you agree the closer you get to the middle-point, the more you disagree the more you get away from that point.
The leader reads out statements about the exchange and the young people choose a spot in the room according to their opinion about that statement. After everyone has chosen his/her position participants can be asked to clarify why they are standing where they are.

At a certain moment the young people can be invited to come up with a statement that they want to check with the group.

Statements could be:

• there is enough free time in the programme
• I can understand everybody in this group
• the food is absolutely fabulous
• I think we are talking too much
• I have some ideas for activities
• ...

For individual young people to evaluate their day in a Youth Exchange or in a European Voluntary Service-project, it can help to give them some guiding questions. You could give a paper with those questions every day or you can provide the young people with a diary where these guiding questions are part of. To provide it in an attractive form and to leave space for drawings, cartoons etcetera, can help.

Guiding questions could be:

• What was the best moment of the day?
• What was a really bad moment?
• Was there something really new that I learned today?
• What would I like to do different in the coming days?
• With whom do I have good contacts?
• With whom would I like to talk?
• ...

Excercise: Secret Friend

Another positive activity to add to a youth exchange could be a game called secret friend.

At the start of the exchange everyone is given a piece of paper with the name of one of the group members: the person on this paper becomes their secret friend for the whole exchange. Their aim is to do nice things for this person, withouth this person discovering who their secret friend is. Maybe secretly leave a bunch of flowers they have picked inside their shoes or write a note complementing them on an achievement they made the previous day.

This activity is particularly beneficial with this target group, who have perhaps little experience of living and functioning in positive, complementary circles. Each day during the evaluation session, any nice secret friend activities can be shared, giving further esteem and value to the recipient but also the secret friend. This is a great opportunity to help young people learn to give to make others feel good, something many will have no experience of. At the end of the exchange participants can guess who their secret friend is.

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Structure and flexibility

This target group often needs a lot of structure and clarity. The programme and time-table of a Youth Exchange should be clear and the same goes for what is allowed and what not. At the same time this group needs to act, to try, to learn from mistakes, to take responsibility, to fulfil tasks, to experience success. The risk in a lot of programmes with these groups is that there is a full exciting programme with lots of interesting activities and exercises but in the end it's the staff that provided the programme and was fully responsible for every minute of the Youth Exchange. Young people just follow the programme but don't take any responsibility, simply because the chance to take responsibility was not offered to them.

Giving responsibility to the young people should be an essential element of the approach and programme. As written before, already a lot can happen relating to this in the preparation phase.

It depends of course a lot on the group you are working with how you bring that into practice. For some young people getting too much responsibility could block them or give them only a bad experience. It's important to tailor your approach in this. The main attitude should be to be always be attentive for 'who could do what'. Some young people could be excellent in guiding the group through an exercise, others can be great in taking care of the sound system. It's about keeping your eyes open for possibilities for young people to act and take responsibility. This also means that the programme should be flexible enough to give space to young people. When you find out that one of the girls is an excellent DJ, there should be the possibility to organise a DJ-workshop, where she can show and share her competences.

Again the trick is to find the right balance between needed structure and flexibility.

In the case of European Voluntary Service-volunteers it's important to plan together with the volunteer what responsibilities he/she will take and how the level of responsibility will increase in the course of time. Also here it's important to adjust tasks and responsibilities to the needs and capacities of the young people.

• In the SALTO-booklet 'Use your hands to move ahead' you can find a lot of information about planning tasks in Short Term European Voluntary Service projects www.salto-youth.net/UseYourHands/
  
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