Livin' High

Strengthened individual's self-confidence and problem solving skills, ability to be flexible to the environment and surroundings, improved focus skills, built trust in self and their team members, opportunity to face and overcome fears, improved physical fitness, endurance as well as mental health, relaxation and self-awareness - these are just some of the many benefits that high-rope activities [both individual and within a group context] can bring to the participants that take part in a well-run session of spending time high above the ground.

In non-formal education, high-rope activities have many possibilities and learning dimensions that can be tackled within the context of youth work [e.g. communication, cooperation, social inclusion, self-awareness, awareness of the group influence and needs of others, etc.], but facilitating these activities is not something one can do without proper knowledge and skills to do so in a safe, but still challenging way [on physical, emotional and mental levels]. Also, the training offered right now in this field can only be done by taking an instructor's training, which can be very expensive and as far as we know, is only available in a selection of countries.
We would like to offer the training course Livin' High to youth workers with the goal to equip them with the competences needed for creating and delivering high-rope activities for the learning of their target groups.

The objectives of the project Livin' High are:

1. To offer the youth workers a thorough and complete program of developing their competences to create and use high-rope activities in their youth work in the form of 1 training course, an ''active practice'' phase back in the home country, and a seminar of evaluating the learning progress and ''filling the blank spaces'',
2. To create a safe, yet challenging environment for the youth workers to explore, learn and develop both on a personal and on a professional level,
3. To equip the youth workers with both the technical skills and knowledge of setting up and delivering high-rope activities in a safe way, and the soft skills needed for guiding their participants through these challenging experiences,
4. To implement a minimum of one ''active practice'' activity per country, and one dissemination activity per country,
5. To create a supportive learning material of the high-rope activities tried out and implemented during the project for the participants to look back to for reference, and also share it with the partner organizations.

As a result of the project, we expect that our partner organizations and their members will have raised their professional competences to create an even more diverse and challenging environment for the youth they work with. And for their target groups - all of the benefits that come from spending time outdoors and working on their interpersonal competences as well as self-awareness - something that we all could use a bit more in every area of our life and development as a growing society.