Strong young minds
Start date: Sep 1, 2016,
End date: Aug 31, 2018
PROJECT
FINISHED
Strong young minds is a strategic partnership project focused on innovation in education, proposed by five organizations from Iceland, Spain, Portugal and Romania, from the fields of mental health and education. The main purpose of the project is to create tools for mental health education for teenagers from Iceland, Romania, Portugal and Spain and to multiply the results among youth workers and educators at a local, national and European level.The objectives are: to increase the capacity of partner organisations to address the mental health educational needs of young people in their communities; to develop a training curriculum, a handbook, a board game, a web page and a series of videos, as tools for mental health education for young people aged 14-18; to facilitate the use of the mental health education tools by youth workers around Europe. The project will focus on teenagers aged 14-18, as main beneficiaries of the curriculum and boardgame that will be developed and on youth workers, as the ones who will use all the new pedagogical tools for educating the young people on mental health topics. Aproximately 500 teenagers and youth workers will participate in the creation, development, testing and multiplication of the project outcomes. The project will include local activities such as needs analysis with teenagers and youth workers, testing activities with teenagers, online and offline dissemination activities, multiplier training courses and a few international onese, such as three work meetings for the development of the tools and coordination of the project, an international testing training course. The methodology used in the project will be mostly non-formal, especially when working directly with the target groups, but also during the local and transnational work meetings of the project team. It will combine theoretical knowledge with brainstorming, work in groups, role plays, arts, team-building activities, open space etc.As a result of their participation in testing the educational tools, teenagers will develop skills derived from the tools themselves, such as building identity, healthy relationships and lifestyle, emotional management, while the youth workers will be better prepared for educating teenagers on mental health topics. The project will have a wider impact, on various levels. The teenagers and youth workers who will use the tools after the completion of the project, will benefit in the same way as mentioned above. The partner organizations and other stake holder organizations will have increased capacity for working with youth, on mental health education, with non-formal methods, in intercultural teams, in long-term projects, under the Erasmus+ programme.