TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Peri Kourakli
The project “Contacts for the Common Future” entitled as “Youth Empowerment and Employment” is using non formal learning methods in order to promote transboundary cooperation for enhancing youth social and labor inclusion. The project is being realized by following the implementation of three activities.
The activity was an interactive capacity building workshop in which organizations/institutions from both neighboring countries was discussing the issue of youth entrepreneurship as a cross border challenge in order to negotiate possible ways so to mitigate it. The workshop took place at 13–15/06/2014 in Krusevo, F.Y.R.O.M. The second activity was a training course of 20 young facilitators which aimed to support the development of the quality of support systems for youth entrepreneurship and strengthen the capacities of organizations/institutions from both neighboring countries for cross-border cooperation. The training course took place at 03-07/07/2014 in Struga, F.Y.R.O.M. The third activity is an interactive capacity building workshop for enhancing the tranbounsary youth entrepreneurship and cooperation. The activity is taking place 2-4/10/2014 in Thessaloniki, Greece.
The targeted group was organizations which are addressing the issue of youth unemployment; this classification included universities, trade unions, labor agencies and NGOs. The participants were from FYROM and Greece.
The workshop was entirely based to non-formal learning. In the first training the participants were experts, so the main tool was group work and some games. The second training included youngsters so the methods were more adaptive to their interests, meaning it included lots of various games, a role play and a bit of group work. The third training attracted young people interested in entrepreneurship and it had a part closed and a part open for other audience, as well. The open part included multiple workshops with different audience and the closed part included games and group work.
The project familiarized the participants with the topic. It provided them with tools so to dress the challenges of youth unemployment. From the experts’ work, a relevant publication was released (http://www.c4cf.org/news.php?ID=9).
The outcomes of the project are also presented in the web: http://www.c4cf.org.
In the first training, I was one of the three facilitators. In the second I was one of the two facilitators, while in the third I was the only facilitator. This means that apart from conducting certain parts of the trainings, I co- formulated the training goals and the agenda of the events and I was responsible for the reporting of the events.