Keys to Communication and Conflict Management in Youth Work

Do you want to…

…improve your communication skills?

…feel more comfortable managing conflicts in the youth field?

…understand how your emotions affect your reactions and the work you do with young people?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, this experience is made for you!

Apply now!

“Keys to communication and conflict management in Youth Work” will be a learning experience for youth workers from locally based organisations. By sharing communication and conflict management methods and techniques, the course aims to enable participants to communicate more effectively, both intrapersonally and interpersonally, to prevent and manage conflict in their grassroots organisations' work context, in their work with young people and in the development of international projects with focus on Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps.

What’s the path we would like to take:

Participants will be driven through an experiential path, explore personal approaches towards conflict, raising awareness of their own and other people's emotions as the basis to be able to conflict resolution, understand basic definitions and mechanisms of conflict and how to dissociate it from aggressive communication and violence and perceive it as constructive disagreement and use of communication and conflict management tools and techniques in group level and working environment and project management, to be able to engage and act as a moderator to deescalate the situation in case of need.

What’s this training try to address:

• Misunderstandings and/or aggression in communication;
• Different language users and people with different cultural and social background tend to communicate differently;
• Highly stressful time due to pandemics restrictions & fear of an unknown situation has changed the forms of communication;
• Work overload and burnout of youth workers that Highlighted the importance of reflect and develop strategies on the topic of mental health and wellbeing;
• Impulsive reactions due to emotional overload and lack of emotional resilience;
• Conflict of interests among counterparts between youth workers and stakeholders;
• Different communication forms between youth workers and youth.

Objectives and expected outcomes:

• To explore the vocabulary and the mechanism of emotions and feelings and our own attitude through different types of conflict;
• To equip youth workers with techniques, methods and tools to face interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict(s) and deal with this issue in their organisations, their Erasmus+/ESC projects and in the work they do with young people;
• To increase the quality of youth work done by the participants by improving their capacities and the capacities of their organisations and as an impact the organisations cooperating with them locally;
• To increase international cooperation of youth workers and foster the exchange of experience, expertise and practices, by networking and forming potential future partnerships;
• To learn where to find existing tools to provide a safe space, foster a nonviolent communication and facilitate group dynamics.

Methodology:

The trainers will foster a self-directed learning process by working on setting the environment of the training rooms and providing a timetable of the activities that will respect time and paces of you as a participant. Sessions will be provided to share tools and methods that can reflect the competences of “Communicating meaningfully with the others” and “Collaborating successfully in a team” coming from the ETS Framework aiming at sustaining quality youth work through competence-based capacity building for youth workers, trainers and staff of the National Agencies of the EU Youth Programmes.

The project is in accordance with the aim of the European Youth Work Agenda, to boost quality youth work and call for common actions within the Bonn process at a local, regional, national or European level, to create spaces to listen to young people’s voices, to build links with other domains in the public and private sphere and to strengthen the provision of quality youth work for the youth work community of practice.

Apply if you are:

- Above 18 years old;

- Able to understand and communicate in English;

- Youth workers, youth leaders or managers/coordinators from local organisations;

- Interested in the topic of communication and conflict management.