The Star of Europe - Czech Republic

Learn How to Make REAL Youth Exchanges!

Whatever you have heard about youth exchanges before or however you have organised them before, this training is teaching you how to make youth exchanges like they are meant to be!  You will learn how to support young people to make their own projects, and not to make the projects for them.

Focus on involvement and partnership

The original idea of a youth exchange is a long term learning process for the groups of young people in participating countries. Young people are involved in a process, where they come up with the idea for the project, choose the topic for it and design the activities for its programme. They run the activities themselves and plan dissemination activities that they organise for other young people.

The process is linked to learning - the more the young people are involved in the process, the more new learning situations they end up in. In The Star of Europe, we will look at all the steps of youth exchange project, to see how the young people can be involved in all aspects of the project, learning new things throughout it.

We will also look at how the young people in each participating countries can be part of the process - that is how the learning is equal in all youth groups, not only the hosting one.

Unlike how many youth exchanges are organised, we want to promote the original idea of youth exchanges - and let the youth exchanges to be young people's own projects, not projects planned by adults to young people.

Aims and objectives

The aim of “The Star of Europe” is to get a comprehensive understanding of what a youth exchange project contains - from the idea, needs assessment of a project to the follow up activities. More specifically, the main objectives are:

1) to understand the the whole logic of lifecycle of a youth exchange project;

2) to focus on participation and learning opportunities of the young people;

3) to pay extra attention to the equal partnership and encourage partners to plan, prepare, implement and report the project together.

Training for newcomers and experienced

If you work regularly with youth groups, professionally or voluntarily, you are a good participant in this training. As a youth worker, youth leader or group leader, you already have a group of interested young people or an idea, how to find an interested group to work with.

You can be a newcomer or someone who has already organised youth exchanges, but has not involved young people in the planning of the projects before.

You will have to be over 18 years old. We prioritise applicants who work directly with a group of young people and who are interested in forming partnerships for future projects.

Digital material for your help

The Star of Europe training course will intorduce you to digital support material that will help you and your young people in your planning process. Each step of the youth exchange project has made into a playlist of videos, exercises, tips and hints on how to plan a youth exchange well.

Each step includes Learning Badges that young people can earn while working on the different elements of project planning. The badges show you the progress in your process and help the young people to see their involvement. After the process the badges help you and your young people to see what learning experiences you will forward to the Youthpasses.

Printed material is also available. Please have a look at The Star of Europe poster and method leaflets by downloading them below.