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Project Development for Social Transformation
Project Development for Social Transformation
Start date: Jan 15, 2016,
End date: Nov 14, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
In a context of instability at social, economic and political level, it becomes of special relevance for youth organizations to arise as a relevant actors and be competent to develop initiatives and projects that address the needs of youngsters and reach the highest quality standards. Lacking competences when planning projects addressing the complex chaning realities youngsters are facing can lead to frustrating consequences, such as misplaced actions, ineffective strategies, lack of funding and impossibility to capitalize results, among others.Against that, “Project Development for Social Transformation” aims to contribute improving of competences of youth workers on project development and management for social change. For that, the project objectives focus on two main elements: First, to gain an overall understanding of social change processes and, second, to increase the capacities of youth workers to designing tailored project proposals that effectively foster these processes.The precise objectives of the project are:• To understand the basic theories of social change and explore the tools to develop them,• To share youth challenges and good practices connected with youth work and social change,• To share and use tools for project development at practical level,• To develop project proposals and establish tailored follow-up activities at local and international level that contribute to social change,• To create a portfolio with activities and good practices used by the organizations,• To create a web-based platform in which the theories of change of the organizations will be shared by using creative methodsThe main activity will be a training course that will take place in Misaktsieli, Georgia, from 24th April until 1st June 2016, with 24 youth workers from the partner organizations from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain. Participants are youth workers, involved in the daily work of the partner organizations, with knowledge of the role of youth work in processes of social change and experienced as project coordinators and/or educators in the youth field. The methodology will be based in non-formal education methods, with special focus on group work and tasks, in order to develop relevant ideas for project development and to establish comprehensive analysis of the needs and capacities for youngsters and youth organizations. The methods planned to be used during the main activity include organized input session to transfer knowledge on specific topics, group work to develop project applications, exercises and workshops to work on the attitudes towards social change, theatre exercises to present outcomes of conceptual discussions, creative workshops to explore alternative ways to present theories of change, role-plays to raise awareness on youth challenges at community level, sharing methods to explore realities and experiences, reflection groups to fine-tune and monitor the process and energizers, name games, ice-breakers and team-building to cohesion the group and contribute to positive group dynamics.The main impact on these youth workers described above will include improved conceptual understanding of the place of youth work in the context of social change processes and capacities to develop consistent theories of change and logical framework in connection with youth work, a diversified understanding of the situation of young people in Europe and the development challenges young people face, an enriched portfolio of possible youth activities that foster youth participation, acquiring new skills for reaching young people with fewer opportunities and to integrate them into the organisations activities and new dissemination and visibility measures for their own youth projects.This project will contribute in the long term to increase the capacities of youth workers and therefore youth organizations to develop strategic planning with comprehensive theories of change, which will increase the level of quality of the youth work and growth the funding opportunities for these types of organizations. This will contribute to a more active youth in Europe and to the provision of opportunities for those youngsters living in deprived or disadvantaged regions or communities.