TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Morgaine Green
The specific objectives of this project were to:
• Explore topics that affect (young) people’s well-being and well-living, such as current wars & genocides, pandemic, colonialism, late-stage capitalism, climate injustice and gender inequality
• Develop an understanding of personal and social emotions, how emotional experience, literacy and expression is also affected by different axes of oppression, power and privilege
• Generate a lived experience of collectivist community simultaneously holding joy, pain, grief and hope through a decolonial and anti-oppressive lens
• Co-create artistic and/or playful tools for transformation using socioaffective methodologies, pedagogies of pleasure, peace education models and cultures of care.
With staggering data about the impacts of recent world affairs on young people: living through a pandemic, experiencing wars and genocides or watching them on a screen, eco-anxiety mounting and entering our dictionaries, class and poverty having disproportionate impact on mental well-being, and capitalism clutching at our mental health by packaging it in individualist “wellness” tropes, Otra Escuela believes in collectivising and decolonising our reactions and actions. If we can
understand our well-being not as part of us or something that belongs to us, but something done to us, and something shared rather than something secluded, we can find solace, solidarity and solution also through a collective response.
Dr Ayesha Khan tells us: "Just like any life-giving, life-sustaining energy that circulates within an ecosystem, we depend on each other to have hope. Like survival, hope is a collective responsibility, not an individual burden. We have to play our role in seeking out community where such hope can be co-created."
We host 24 participants living in 7 countries (Spain, Italy, Netherlands, France, Poland, Malta and Palestine), and 4 people from the Otra Escuela team in charge of logistics, coexistence, management with the host community and self-managed food/lodging, content and facilitation, for 6 days of residential training on the relationship between the mental health of young people and people who work in the youth and social field, with systems of oppression, the axes of discrimination, social movements, participation and the collective construction of hope. Through non-formal, participatory, playful-creative and
socio-affective methodologies, intercultural dialogue and community-based co-living, we will work on the politicisation of mental health (and neurodivergence) and social emotions, starting from our own emotional literacy and individual and collective identities.
Workers in the youth-social field, educators, activists, Non-Formal Education trainers, volunteers, community organisers and young people of legal age, especially those people with social, economic, migratory, disability and/or discrimination barriers, and/or those who work with young people of these descriptions, as well as young people (18+) interested in promoting their own initiatives, organisations or community projects.
We intend to investigate empirical and collective research of our nervous systems and their self-regulation, and their bridges between the relational, political, social, cultural and personal, through:
(1) "Provention" (provision of tools) for cultures of peace – linked to relational activism and transformative approaches for groups relations, this model (Paco Cascón) contemplates 7 essential steps for the being and doing of a healthy group or community. These are presentation (importance of names and who we are); knowledge (of oneself and others); appreciation; trust; communication; consensus and cooperation. At the same time, it works inwards and outwards on the need to provide tools in these areas to unite the group and be able to address other sensitive topics during this course, and teaches in an experiential way a commitment to relating with more empathy and care in the face of the systems that violate us and everyone.
(2) Key concepts – “Snowball” techniques will be used to co-construct definitions; image theatre (from theatre of the oppressed) to delve into the main elements, serving as a starting point and creating a common base.
(3) Personal identity – we will explore self-knowledge and diversity, what makes us unique, how we are vs. who we want to be, what defines our mind, body, essence, energy, what comes from inside to outside, and what influences from outside to inside.
(4) Personal emotions – we will take a look at literacy and management of emotions, the importance of self-care and selfcompassion for all people, especially working with young people in vulnerable situations and in the social sphere. For this, art and craft techniques will be used (using recycled and natural materials to discover the textures and images that relate to different families of emotions).
(5) Social emotions – with exercises based on clown/embodied techniques we will learn these emotions and discover which ones are more or less familiar to us or easy to inhabit/sustain, how they mobilise us more/less or are more/less accepted by other people when we express them openly. We will investigate how some emotions such as love and anger, when socialised, can activate social change ("fierce love" by Martin Luther King Jr. or the "anger activism" model) or the construction of the enemy ("us/them" - loyalty/otherness).
(6) Power and privilege – simulation and role-playing games to relate these concepts to our realities and identities.
(7) Collective identity – relevance, how (6) relates to (3), what groups/communities I belong to, the intersectionality of race, gender, class, disability, neurodiversity, ethnicity, orientation, and other axes that cross us.
(8) Our contexts – interactive sharing by national subgroups, exchanging their local/regional concerns and initiatives.
(9) Relational care and collective hope – OE's central commitment to care for self, others, the collective and the land in an interdependent way, positioning it as a practice of hope (an active and collective responsibility).
(10) Intercultural teamwork – we will prepare 4 mixed groups to, having been inspired by our proposals, co-create activities to implement them with the large group, practicing their own facilitation in a safe space, as a lived experience example of channeling collective power, the mobilisation of imagination and creative motivation.
(11) Framing of learning and evaluation – participatory harvesting of content, self-assessment of personal and professional learning, feedback and emotional closure in group and individual assessments of different elements and spaces of the activity.
During the project period, professionals and their organisations benefit in the following ways:
- By better understanding the relationship with oneself, the vulnerability of certain groups and individuals, self-care and relational care, they will improve their own self-esteem, self-knowledge and emotional literacy, which will allow them to better understand and be able to better care for their young people and target groups.
- Acquisition of concrete and practical pedagogical and methodological tools.
- Understand, share and value experiences and learning from other professionals, applicable to their realities and target groups.
- Awareness of cultural and social differences, privileges and inequalities from intercultural dialogue and an intersectional perspective.
- Increase in quality in group facilitation, accompaniment of training and psychosocial/socioaffective processes and management of social projects.
- Increased awareness and knowledge of European strategies and European programmes.
- In-person skills to work on various topics in different scenarios from participatory, creative, playful and socio-affective methodologies.
- An established network of community and support from others in the social and youth fields.
Project designer, coordinator and facilitator/trainer.
I can confirm that Morgaine was the project designer, coordinator and trainer of this successful and impactful activity, both for participants and partners involved.