Erasmus+ Programme

Key action 1 - Learning Mobility of Individuals

Mobility project for young people and youth workers

THE PERFECT MATCH

Training program to overcome boundaries

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Lunaria has been launched in 2013, a long term strategy to be implemented in 2014, which aims to tackle in the most detailed way, from the perspective of young people, of youth-social workers and Ngos, the topic of DISABILITY.

The core point of this strategy is disability and all the important questions that surround this word and that sometimes may appear in our mind …..

How do we define disability and why? Are prejudices or preconceived ideas influencing or affecting our way of act, when we meet people with disabilities? How do we use words and definitions? Do we use labels and what are the consequences, direct or indirect? How do we picture, in our perception, the life of people with disabilities? How to overcome our “pre-established mental pictures” in order to create a real interaction and exchange? How to make the young people in condition to approach this topic from a wider and equal perspective? Do we think we can concretely intervene to create together, new learning opportunities, where heterogeneous groups, can mutually learn and cooperate? How to provide the youth-social workers and the peer educators, that work with young people with and without disabilities, with new tools to approach disability and to facilitate the equal, active participation of these young people, in their activities?

These are just some of the questions that might be tackled during the process that we would like to undertake and that foresee to develop two specific measures:

  • youth exchange: aimed to gather young people from different countries and, through the use of non formal education and artistic methodologies (dance and music), to make them interact and exchange life’ experiences, perspectives and point of views. The initiative, in common agreement with all the partner promoters and being a pilot project, intends to address one specific type of disability, that is blindness, total or partial.

The project was implemented last April 2014 by Lunaria, in cooperation with the international partners CBB, COCAT and SCI Vitosha and saw the active participation of 24 young people, 4 group leaders and 4 accompanying persons.

  • training course: aimed to deepen the youth work about disability targeting the project to the youth and the social workers that daily realize activities with people with disabilities; to explore the non formal education methodologies that can be used to better implement the work with people with disabilities; to exchange the good practices and virtuous experiences on this field and to develop new working methods to facilitate the active participation, to projects and initiatives at local and international level, of heterogeneous groups composed by young people with and without disabilities.

The idea is to use the feedbacks and results collected during the youth exchange, to structure in the best way the training course agenda and working methods.

In this case the training won’t be focused on one specific type of disability but will address different types of disabilities.

  • Training for trainers (peer educators): dedicated to youngsters with and without disabilities, taking the outcomes from the youth exchange and the training course, participants will share good practices and working methods and learn new methodologies to realize new inclusive projects targeted to heterogeneous groups, composed by young people with and without disabilities.

The training for trainers will be dedicated to the youngsters who have participated in the previous youth exchange but also to other young people, with and without disabilities, active in this field and interested to promote social inclusion. Participants will have the common mission of developing and testing the toolkit that will be the outcome of the training program, and that will contain a series of activities ready to be used in voluntary projects and Erasmus+ activities, targeted to young people with and without disabilities participate.

Participants will experiment a combination of different non formal and outdoor activities, usually used in voluntary service and training activities. The innovative aspect of this project is that they will have the opportunity to practically test these working methods during the experience itself and to reshape them, according to the needs to adapt non formal education methodologies in the projects targeted to heterogeneous groups including young people with and without disabilities.

Furthermore, an important goal of this training for trainers, is that it is an action to empower future trainers and group leaders, so to make them in condition to run an inclusive and participative project that includes people with and without disabilities. Participants will acquire the necessary knowledge, abilities and skills to become peer educators, able to accompany a person facing disabilities, to encourage his/her participation and to guarantee an appropriate multilevel learning process. In this way, also the local and international groups, as also the local communities participating in the future projects, will take a great benefit from the experience and will consider disability from other perspectives and points of view.

In the entire strategy and in all the projects we believe that the key element it’s the active participation. By practically experiment what disability is, doing that from different perspectives and exchanging life’ experiences, it can be possible to implement a concrete strategy aimed to explore disability in an omni-comprehensive manners. In this process, the main idea it’s not to “integrate” people with disability, but to find the most suitable way to give value to the different skills and abilities in order to activate new forms of participation and understanding.

General remarks: this strategy aims to create an informal network of organizations willing to deepen the topic of disability and to export the experience in their own local realities. For this reason we like to consider the Perfect Match as an open format that can be used and adapted according to the local background needs, by each partner organization interested.

In this perspective, since we believe in an horizontal cooperation, we are kindly asking all those organizations willing to participate, to actively contribute to the project implementation by sharing the experiences they had in the field of disability and the working methods they used and are using.

COMMON METHODOLOGY AND SUBJECTS

THEMES AND MAIN TOPICS OF THE TRAINING:

DISABILITY AND ACTIVE INVOLVEMENT OF HETEROGENEOUS GROUPS OF YOUNG PEOPLE WITH AND WITHOUT DISABILITIES:

  • Disability and ICL: setting of a deepened and detailed analysis of the different backgrounds' problems, specifically related to the way to tackle disability;
  • Barriers: what we do define barriers and how is it possible overcome them;
  • Language and labels: how, sometimes unconsciously, we de use words and definitions and what are the consequences of using labels in the identification of specific target groups;
  • Knowledge sharing: analysis of the measures undertaken in the different countries to encourage and to facilitate the active participation of young people with and without disability. In this session a specific space will be dedicated to the good practices adopted and the working methods used;

ART, OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES, NON FORMAL EDUCATION, NON VERBAL COMMUNICATION AND DIFFERENT FORMS OF EXPRESSION TO APPROACH DISABILITY FROM A WIDER AND INCLUSIVE PERSPECTIVE;

  • How to use artistic and outdoor activities to approach young people with and without disability and to encourage them to exchange feelings and life’ experiences creating a real, equal encounter, promoting the self confidence and the trust in the group;
  • Development of new interactive tools, based on the combination of art, outdoor activities and non formal education, to really make effective the communication and the interaction of young people with and without disabilities, to make them in condition to recognize their capacities and to develop new skills;
  • Deepening the conflicts that might raise within heterogeneous groups of young people with and without disability: how to use artistic channels, outdoor activities and non formal education to manage these conflicts in creative and non violent ways;

ACCESS FOR DISADVANTAGE, CONSIDERING THE ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP AS A WAY TO FORECAST EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR EVERYBODY AND TO DEVELOP NEW FORMS OF PARTICIPATION WITHIN THE LOCAL COMMUNITIES;

  • Knowledge transmission: the basic idea is to make the participants in condition to practically use the tools learned and to transmit them. In fact it’s expected that on their way back, they will organize workshops and laboratories tailor made on the needs of their local backgrounds and targeted to other colleagues working with disability. The spreading of knowledge will also take place in the implementation of specific laboratories targeted to the young people they work with: this action will move them from the status of “direct beneficiaries” to the one of “active promoters” and will give them the opportunity to start a process to become peer educators;
  • Implementation of new initiatives and projects: during the training participants will be also provided by information and tools to conceive, design and implement new local and international projects aimed to raise awareness toward disability and to further develop the interaction of young people with and without disability, facilitating their joint participation in the same initiatives.

WORKING METHODS: trainings should be conceived as the proper stage where knowledge and skills can be exchanged in a peer perspective. For this reason the relation among trainers, facilitators and trainees has to be based on the idea that they are mutually learning from each other and that the active participation is the “key” word in the entire process.

The interactive methodologies that will be proposed during the training come from the combination of non formal education, artistic and outdoor activities. All of them foresee the active involvement of participants in each stage of the process and promote the horizontal exchange of competences. In this perspective ice breakers, team building activities, energisers, role play games, simulations, debates and workshops are interactive tools to stimulate the active participation of trainees.

During the project the swap of technical knowledge and tools will be encouraged and the different learning approaches will be constantly stimulated and evaluated through specific sessions on learning assessment. A specific attention will be dedicated to the different learning processes, to the individual learning styles and to the specificity of the individual skills.

The decision to use non formal education, outdoors activities and artistic channels to approach disability, due to their expressive power and to their capability to touch different target groups, coming from different backgrounds and life experiences. These methods will to be also used in the follow up phase, where the participants will spend the skills developed and the methodologies acquired to train, on one hand, other colleagues working in the field of disability and, on the other hand, to organize and lead short term local and international projects targeted to heterogeneous groups.

THE PERFECT MATCH

Training for Youth Workers

Mobility project for young people and youth workers

Learning Mobility of Individuals, Key Action 1

19th – 26th October 2014

(19th October 2014: arrival day; 27th October 2014: departure day)

TENUTA SANT’ANTONIO, Via Formello 4, Poggio Mirteto Scalo (RT), ITALY

DATES: 19th – 26rd October 2014 (8 working days)

ARRIVAL DAY: 19th October 2014

DEPARTURE DAY: 27th October 2014

PLACE: TENUTA SANT’ANTONIO, Via Formello 4, Poggio Mirteto Scalo (RT), ITALY.

For more information you can have a look of their web site:

ACCOMMODATION: participants will sleep in dormitories and shared rooms with bunk beds (4 to 8 beds), with shared bathroom. They will be asked to support and to give their contribution in the shift for cooking and preparing meals. Participants will be asked to collaborate in the daily maintenance tasks, such as cleaning the common spaces and giving a hand in the kitchen (cleaning dishes, set the table, etc.). We kindly remind everybody to inform about any specific needs concerning food or allergies and to do it in the application form or via e-mail!

PARTNERSHIP AND PARTICIPANTS:11EUorganisations

LUNARIA / Italy / 2 participants
Association des Compagnons Bâtisseurs / Belgium / 3 participants
Asociación para la Mediación Social EQUA / Spain / 3 participants
Grenzenlos - interkultureller Austausch / Austria / 2 participants
INEX SLOVAKIA / Slovakia / 2 participants
Internationale Begegnung in Gemeinschaftsdiensten – IBG / Germany / 2 participants
UNAREC / France / 2 participants
SKEP - Association of Social Responsibility for Children and Youth / Greece / 3 participants
Unione Italiana dei Ciechi e degli Ipovedenti ONLUS / Italy / 1 participant
Sport Club for Integration "Vitosha" / Bulgaria / 3 participants
Utilapu Nemzetkozi Epitotabor Halozat / Hungary / 2 participants

AGE: 18+

TARGET GROUP: Youth-social workers and peer educators, active at local level in their associations or youth centres and that implement grass-rooted activities with young people with and without disabilities. It’s also recommended, for the sending organizations partners in the youth exchange, to keep involved in the process the youth/social workers who have already participated in the youth exchange.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

  • to deepen the work about disability from the youth, social workers and peer educators’ perspective’s;
  • to set a deep and detailed analysis of the different backgrounds' problems, specifically related to disability and the way to dial with them;
  • to exchange the good practices and the virtuous experiences taking place in each background and that contribute to empower the youth work quality on this field;
  • to exchange the different working methods adopted in each country to facilitate the active participation of young people with disability to local and international activities and projects;
  • to develop new working methods to facilitate the active participation, to projects and initiatives at local and international level, of young people with and without disabilities;
  • to give to the participants the opportunity to export the new competences and skills they have gained during the training so that they can share them with other colleagues activating a multiplying effect;
  • to ease the creation of an informal network (made up of youth workers, social workers, peer educators, associations and Ngos) aimed to develop new concrete possibilities to involve young people with and without disabilities and to develop working methods able to ensure an equal and fair participation;

AIM: the aim of the training course is to provide youth-social workers and peer educators, that work with young people with and without disabilities, with new tools to approach disability and to stimulate the equal, active participation of these young people in the activities they daily run at local level in their local communities and at international level.

FINANCIAL CONDITIONS:

For travel distances between:

  • 100 – 499 Km: 180€ per participant
  • 500 – 1.999 Km: 275€ per participant
  • 2.000 – 2.999 Km: 360€ per participant
  • 3.000 – 3.999 Km: 530€ per participant

+ 100% food and lodgement covered by the project

Normally the refund process can take, approximately, 4 – 6 months.

All the tickets cannot be bought before the 1st of July 2014 that is the official starting date of the project: all the expenses done before this date are not eligible and cannot be refunded. Please before booking write us an e-mail and wait for our confirmation.

GENERAL REMARKS: we kindly remind that the project dates are 19th – 26th October 2014.

The arrival day is scheduled for the 19th October 2014 and the departure day for the 27th October 2014.

If participants want to spend a couple of more days in Italy, we remind them that they can do it before the beginning or at the end of the training. We kindly remind everybody that during the project won’t be accepted exceptions like late arrivals (not in the scheduled arrival day) or early departures (before than the scheduled departure day) and that the youth training is composed by 8 intensive, stimulating and participative working days.

*** BE SURE THAT YOU AGREE WITH ALL THIS BEFORE COMING ***

TO DO LIST:

We kindly ask to the sending organizations to follow the steps listed below:

1. send the application form to the e-mail address:

  1. to wait for our confirmation before issuing the tickets
  2. participants will be required to do some preparatory work before joining the project: they will receive an e-mail with the explanation of the preparatory activities and they are kindly asked to fulfil the task before the beginning of the project.