opportunity
Start date: Feb 1, 2015,
End date: Nov 1, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
This project comes as a result of many years of experience in EVS in the Aude department. The manager of this project, after spending ten years dealing with youth mobility, decided to find the way to increase the number of young people having an experience abroad, as this is a key factor to increase their employability.
Mobility in Europe is now very easy and cheap but there are still a lot of young people that only go abroad for short holiday trips learning little or nothing about other cultures, languages, habits, and so on. This project has been planned keeping this in mind and it aims at reaching this target and giving them an opportunity to go abroad, learn new skills, improve their English, improve their self-confidence, learn a new language, become more indipendent and open minded.
To ensure their curiosity can be even more stimulated and their experience can have an even bigger impact on their lives, French young people will be mixed with volunteers coming from other countries and facing the same challange as they are. This will also ensure a deeper intercultural experience for them.
The project involves 18 young people from five European countries and involves six host countries and seven partners.
Their profile is different but they are all unemployed with a high risk of being excluded or marginalized from the society even though they have very different backgrounds. The activities foreseen include a wide range of activities with a focus on environment, sustainability and communication: some of them will be experiencing an outdoor environment where nature, environment protection and awareness are merged altogether, some of them will be more focusing on communication and media as tools to promote sustainability and green economy, some of them will be more into intercultural learning, raising awareness on the environment with very diverse target groups.
The methodology of the project is based on non formal education and experiential learning, giving to each participants stimulus, space and time needed to learn and improve their skills. The goal of the project is to encourage young people involved to find a long-term experience abroad (internship, language course, au pair, voluntary service or work) after their short-term EVS is over to leave for a longer period, focus on their learning path and ultimately find a job. In a long-term perspective, we expect young people to be employed and satisfied, act as multiplier with their peers and be themselves promoters of international mobility and non-formal learning as life-fulfilling experiences that can reduce marginalisation and reduce youth unemployement.