The Changemakers

Schools are supposed to encourage active participation of youth in their communities. However under the burden of curricula and the lack of interest of young people they cannot succeed in an optimal way. Moreover, many families do not educate their children in civic awareness but on the contrary encourage their children to initiate civic actions only in exchange of financial rewards. Thus young people develop negative attitudes towards voluntary active participation which leads to massive underdevelopment of their communities. The short term effects are an increased passivity about the problems of their environment, weak engagement in finding solutions for community problems and youngsters lacking practical and non-formal social education. On the long term this leads to passive adults who are not willing to bring their unique contribution to the development of their community, and further to their society. And to make it worse, this phenomenon eventually increases through the absence of people who could serve as role models. This all illustrates the importance of youth workers in creating active citizenship. Through their skills they provide new perspectives, ways of learning and motivation, they complement young people’s education with competences that are not developed in school settings, they offer young people oriented support, opportunities for non-formal learning, access to information and opportunities for positive integration in the local community. The scope of the project is to equip youth workers with the necessary competences to run educational programs in order to raise the level of active participation among young people in their communities. Our objectives with this training are: - To undertake a learning journey on active participation - To understand and explore NFE learning principles, tools, methods and instruments; - To upgrade the experience of a European dimension for the participants; - To raise participants’ awareness about their own self development and their roles as youth workers; - To provide participants with practical tools, methods and instruments which will ensure their effectiveness when designing educational programs centered on active participation; - To enable participants to acquire skills related to leadership, communication, critical thinking and tolerance in the context of European active participation; - To empower participants to understand their active participation leads to change; - To share examples of good practice from the partner countries; - To encourage participant reflect on their own learning process.