Day 2: Diving deep below the surface of youth work

The second day of the training course has arrived together with the new snow. This was one more reason, the participants to get even more inspired and start the morning session with lots of enthusiasm. It was the time to be creative in presenting the organisations where the participants are coming from. Many new opportunities came out from this session and already new potential cooperation has been discussed among the different organisations. Eager to learn more about each other, all of them dived into the next session of exploring the needs and challenges that they are facing during their every-day work as youth workers.

Kirsty from UK liked very much the discussion about these challenges, because she could see different approaches from different organisations dealing with same challenges. Many of the representatives from different European countries were focusing a lot on international cooperation when doing the activities and her work consists mostly of local projects and action. Therefore, she could take with herself home many new ideas and implement them into her work at her youth center in UK.

As the training programme dictates a very dynamic flow of the activities, some participants liked very much the step-by-step approach which facilitate their learning. Ivana from Macedonia was stressing this out as something very important for her own participation in the group. The connection between the sessions and the relevance of the topics helped her a lot to understand better the concept that were being discussed. If yesterday most of the things were a bit unclear for her, today that was not the case at all. She also added that the diverse set of methodologies used by the trainers, offer space for people to become more creative in expressing their thoughts and opinions. The role play which was done in small groups today, revealed many talents that the participants have which make the whole learning process even more exciting, said Ivana.

In same direction, Hannah from Switzerland mentioned that she would have appreciated more time for preparing this role-plays, because her group really wanted to present the different challenges and needs on a clear and also creative way. For today, Hannah thought that was very useful to focus on her own interests during the individual reflection. The competences that still need to be developed further were written in the personal diaries.

Today a chance was offered for the participants to dig a bit deeper into the topics related to the challenges in youth work. Maybe sometimes many of the things seem very simple, but after a thorough discussion and reflection, we as youth workers realize that self-development never stops. Tomorrow we go even further into the area of youth worker’s competences, paying significant attention on the knowledge, skills and attitudes.