TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Darko Mitevski
1. Filling the gaps in knowledge of the organizations. Many organizations have limited knowledge how to organize a quality youth exchange, training or a project. Our goal is to identify all the challenges that the organizations have such as: development of the organizations, lack of quality trainers, knowledge of how to write applications for Erasmus +, how to establish good and quality relations with partners from countries they didnt work with, how to motivate volunteers to join their organization, how to manage the projects from financial or logistics point of view, basically to identify all challenges that they have from organizational point of view.
2. Come out with solutions for how to address those problems - creating Train the trainers, creating a training that will help them increase the capacity of the organization, create a training on visibility and recruitment and engagement of young people in the program(especially for the countries where the program is not so well known and young people are unaware of the opportunities, creating a training on strategic and organizational issues(how to get sustainable funding, local government support , or sponsor companies, creating a training on soft skills such as presentation skills, public speaking, negotiations skills, project management etc.
3. The third goal is concerning the countries where the program is not so known, and putting them in "buddy" system where they will get a buddy organization from the strong countries. Example: Organization X from Germany to be a buddy of organization Y in Portugal and to help them with transfer of know-how, job shadowing, and advices of how to develop their organization better so they will be able to present and involve the Portuguese youth on a higher level. The same can be done between the Norwegian organization and some organization from example Palestine that doesn’t have so many opportunities to create projects.
4. To intensify the cooperation between the partner countries and the program countries. We rarely see projects where countries from Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus (and other countries) sends participants. These countries have many issues that are troubling them - civil war, tribal or ethnical intolerance, religious extremism and so on. It is our responsibility to create opportunities for the young people in these countries to travel and to educate themselves and to be the leaders of tomorrow in their own societies and to promote understanding, tolerance and cooperation. This will only be possible if the people establish good and trustworthy cooperation’s and friendships.
Target group of participants: Directors/managers or NGOs, project managers, trainers - basically all decision makers in organizations.
Partner countries: Macedonia, Egypt, UK, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Spain, Norway and Germany.
Many different non-formal methods were used for this project: organizational fair was used as a method for the pairing of the buddy cooperation between the organizations, step by step project idea development where the participants had to develop their project ideas in small groups under pressure of very limited time, we had living library with the NA, Q&As, video presentations of short movies to present the output, many small group discussion, reflection and discussion different methods...
We have reached all outcomes of the project:
1. We have made buddy sistem between organizations, and the partners signed contracts for future cooperation with deadlines, activities, responsible people.
2. We have identified key challenges that the organizations and societies face and discussed solutions for these challenges.
3. We have developed 8 trainings that are going to address those challenges: digital and media skills for youth workers, training for methods with disadvantaged groups of people(human trafickig, people with diss disabilities, other disadvantaged groups, Training for youth workers for Entrepreneurship as a way to combat youth unemployment, Training about environment, Training about financial sustainability of NGOs, Training/project making for raising the awareness about corruption, training for using arts as non-formal methods)
4. We have developed tool - guide that is going to help organizations how to organize better projects.
I have coordinated the trainers team, organized and lead the pre-meeting, supported the other trainers and provided feedback, developed the workshops about project idea creation, responsible for the overall reaching of the objectives of the project, coordinated the project visit from Norwegian NA and incorporated in the living library method, Q&A, and "how to" methods, prepared the input and output of the project, coordinated with the organizer of the project.