Partner Up!

Aims & objectives

The "Partner Up" Partnership Building Activity aimed to create concrete partnerships between organizations providing cultural activities for young people. The project focused on establishing effective, inclusive partnerships to implement high-quality international projects. Participants developed new project ideas, shared past experiences, and enhanced their project management skills through mentorship. The project accelerated learning, distributed knowledge, and motivated greater impact on local communities, offering a valuable opportunity for teams to share their expertise in non-formal education. Objectives:
- to bring together youth workers in order to create new project ideas within the Erasmus programme;
- to build the capacity of participating NGO's in project management within the Erasmus programme;
- to provide information about structure and tools aimed to help and improve the quality of youth projects.

Target group & international/intercultural composition of the group & team

The participants in the training were representatives of partner organisations and project managers with youth worker backgrounds responsible for coordinating youth projects in their organisations.
The countries involved were North Macedonia, Serbia, Italy, Croatia, Turkey, Spain, Slovenia, and Romania with 22 participants.

Training methods used & main activities

Different non-formal education methods were used during this training, including icebreakers, team-building activities, group work, treasure hunts, role plays and reflection activities.
Here is the description of non-formal method we used:
Organisations Gallery - preparation and presentation to create a short presentation about
organisations; to provide space for networking between participating organisations and planning of further cooperation
Preparation (45 minutes) Trainers introduced the session and its objective. Referring back to instructions they received from the organizers and trainers on the FB group, this session is going to entail the sharing of experiences and organisation market. Trainers prepared instructions on how to make the T-shirts on flip charts with information about participants organisations. The instructions were presented and participants need to include several elements in the presentation:
- name, location
- mission
- beneficiaries
- activities /programmes/projects
- what are the needs of young people in my local community
- experience in project writing
- experience in the Erasmus+ programme
- list of topics in which we would like to implement a project;
- how we can contribute to project development and implementation – expertise.
Presentations (45 minutes)
Participants have 2-3 minutes to present themselves, their organisation and their motivation for involvement in this training. Presentations will be presented in the way that participants will walk a runaway with T-shirts on.
In this publication you can find the timetable:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/10wA16zflKQ0C84mtTWGZuqE2dFNL0t4P

Outcomes of the activity

- 5 project ideas developed during the PBA, one is applied for funding on the February 2022. Erasmus deadline and got approved for funding
- A PBA handbook created, published and disseminated
Info: https://izvanfokusa.hr/portfolio/partnerup/
Publication: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/10wA16zflKQ0C84mtTWGZuqE2dFNL0t4P

Your tasks and responsibilities within the team

I was in charge of preparatory tasks for participants, most of the logistics of the training, as well as preparing and implementing educational program and coordinating dissemination activities.
I was the co-trainer for this training in a team that consisted of 2 experienced trainers.

I worked on this training for 5 days as a full time trainer.