TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Ilona Olehlova
Main aim of the project was to provide extraordinary learning process, which promoted professional and personal development of youth workers and gave knowledge about adventure education and implementing its principles in the activities with aims of social inclusion and combating youth unemployment.
Training activities involved youth workers and experts coming from 21 organizations working for unemployed youth and young people with fewer opportunities from 21 culturally diverse countries : Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, Russia, Armenia, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.
Training program was based on the principles of approach called adventure education. And it included cooperative games, trust-building activities, problem solving initiatives, high adventure activities and wilderness expeditions for example hiking tour. Physical and mental challenges were designed as metaphors for professional challenges in the organisations.
With this training course we wished to explore contributions of adventure training to development of transferable skills, and learned tools and approaches that could be applied in practical work with unemployed young people. We wished to give our own contribution in efforts of young people to overcome their obstacles and gave positive affirmation, encouragement and support to those in hard situation.
As a trainer I was involved in sessions focus on following issues and topics: conflict and conflict management, team work and communication in intercultural team, problem solving as I realized several activities with goal to increase creativity and their abilities to use creative methods in non-formal settings.