TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Iwan Brioc
The aim of the training was to expand the knowledge, skills and confidence in the network in the art of facilitating creative intercultural exchanges, to enable there to be a register of facilitators available to the network and also to introduce to new organizations the particular Drums for Peace way of facilitating youth exchanges.
The project happened in the context of the ongoing training we try to provide within the Drums for Peace Network to enable us to maintain the quality in our youth exchanges and in the youth work of the partnership organizations.
The initiative for the project originated in the Drums for Peace Network meeting in Denmark, in August 2010. The partnership there decided that every youth exchange should have a designated facilitator that ‘holds’ the whole group. This could be one of the artists a director or a co-ordinator of the exchange. What was important was that they had the skills to facilitate large and diverse groups and felt confident to do so through the journey of the exchange. When we realized that the amount of people falling into this category in our network could be counted on one hand then training was proposed.
The objectives therefore were to –
1. Train potential facilitators (and in particular young artists and youth workers) so that they have the confidence, knowledge and enthusiasm to facilitate a Drums for Peace youth exchange.
2. Introduce some of the core concepts behind the Drums for Peace Network way of working to potential new partners from Turkey and Hungary.
3. Establish a register of Drums for Peace Facilitators
4. Note down some of the key components of facilitating a youth exchange, as a basis for further research and possible publication on a future project in this strand.
The participants were 29 cultural youth workers from organisations in Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Estonia and Wales who were partners in the Drums for Peace network.
The training team comprised musician and voice coach -Richardt Nielsen, Denmark; Ballet teacher and choreographer - Aleksandra Jones, Serbia and myself (from Wales)
The training tried to replicate some aspects of a youth exchange, in particular the tensions that young people experience having such a short time to make a performance, and performing in front of an audience sometimes for the first time. This was done by asking all participants to prepare the performance of a poem, song, dance, story that had moved them, and to perform this alone in front of the others.
We also approached the role of the facilitator from three different perspectives represented by the three trainers – the voice of the facilitator, the body of the facilitator and the mind of the facilitator with an emphasis on authentic leadership.
There were teaching sessions on group dynamics, transactional analysis, making group contracts, conflict prevention, diversity and types of Youth Exchange; regular breakout discussion groups on the role of the facilitator; and opportunities for each participant to facilitate an activity and receive feedback.
Each evening also had an activity programmed including a tour of the town, an inter- cultural evening and a traditional Welsh folk dancing evening (Twmpath Dawns).
This training was more successful than could have been expected. The three main trainers who had never worked together before found common ground immediately and will continue to collaborate after the success of this training, with plans to offer leadership training to organizations in Denmark as a starting point.
Participants also were taken aback by how empowering and insightful the process was to where they are at the moment in terms of their capacity to facilitate and also in the subtle and experiential way that the ethic of Drums for Peace facilitating was related to them.
The group had varying experience of D4P youth exchanges ages and abilities, and perhaps some with more experience felt that the training was not always relevant though immensely useful. We have taken on board feedback and know how to improve on this training for future versions of Juggling Water.
I coordinated the project and led the training team. My focus within the training activity was in using games and discussing their function; exploring the authentic mind of the facilitator through experiential learning; holding the mastery process; mentoring one of the three tutor groups and facilitating feedback and evaluation.