TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Daniel John Carter
The idea of the accessible project cycle management skills, came from the need to involve youngsters from marginalized communities and stimulate their active citizenship. The project wanted to put special emphasis on organizing project with vulnerable, and aimed to equip the participants with competences to develop project cycles driven by the notion of “inclusion” and “accessibility”.
The objectives of the training course were:
- To introduce principles of “Project Cycle Management” and criteria to assess quality in projects focusing on social inclusion of youngsters with fewer opportunities
- To develop competences needed for developing and running projects for inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities.
- To develop participants’ understanding of participation projects cycle, including needs analysis, aims, objectives, methodology, plan of activities, evaluation and follow-up.
- To exchange experiences, good practices, opinions, educational tools and materials related to projects on social inclusion.
Participants coming from 10 different countries worked to develop guidelines for youth workers and youth organizations on how to organize accessible youth projects.
The project is organized in partnership with organizations from Austria, Azerbijan, Croatia, Poland, Turkey, Urkaine, Spain, Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia.
The TC was coordinated by Center For Intercultural Dialogue, Macedonia and the training team consiste dof Setfan Manevski (MK), Milos Ristovski (MK) and Daniel John Carter (Wales, UK).
The training was completely non-formal education based and due to its nature on project a cycle mangement a significant portion of the methods used were taken from the T-Kits Organisational Mangement book. Due to the trainiers backgorunds a large protion of the cycle management was based upon the USA Peace Corps service cycle management methods as well as methods used by Cardiff Metropolitan University education department. These included methods of Needs Assessment and the Project Cycle spiral.
Some unique methods based on inclusion were developed by the trainers also as well as activities for intercultural learning. These were also based on methods from the T-Kits and Compass non-formal education manuals.
An number of different energizers and Ice-breakers were used such as 'map of europe', '2 truths and a lie' and 'horse race'. These are all ones learnt by each trainer and particpants over the years.
The partcipants learnt how to and dveloped methods of creating, implementing and evaluation projects with / alongside as well as to facilitate young peoples project cycle management rather than do it for them.
They created six hypothetical projects of which some participants are trying to realize.
Before creating these hypothetical projects the participants developed guidelines for Accessible Project Cycle Mangement. These can be found here: http://issuu.com/danieljohncarter/docs/apcm_guidelines.docx
As onw of three trainers I was brought in for realtion of the subject to grassroots youth work. As a rainer on the team with the most experience working with a variety off young people including those with fewer opportunies, but not so much the expert in theory of project cycle mangement I was responsible for realtion the actual youth work, deifinitions of youth work, understanding needs assessment and adaptation to change in needs.
I ran the sessions on understanding youth work, performing needs assessment, adaptation, inclusion and was a mentor for two groups during project creation.