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Youth Well-Being Training Course
Youth Well-Being Training Course
Start date: Feb 1, 2015,
End date: Jan 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
National governments, civil society organisations and international agencies have for many years assembled and reported data on achieved human well-being, be it for individuals, families, regions or countries. Human well-being achievement at the level of countries receives special attention. It is now commonplace for international agencies, such as United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, to publish annual reports that rank countries according to various well-being or well-being related indicators. At the same time the obesity levels of youth are rising on uncontrollable (and scary!) levels. So despite the fact that various theorists analyse well-being on a number of indicators, such as political, income-based, social, gender, sustainability and various composite indexes, young people are merely numbers. And limited attention (and initiatives) are actually introduced in order to address the reasons of the lack of well-being, rather than to merely analyse it.
This project directly responds to that problem. Young people who come to the ASHA Centre are often stimulated to ask questions about day-to-day personal well-being, and we aim to support them in making positive life-style choices. Surrounded by the Forest of Dean, the ASHA Centre provides an excellent setting for improving well –being. We regularly host groups that practice yoga, meditation, counseling. We have a biodynamic garden producing healthy, vital, organic food for our volunteers and course(s) participants. Not only therefore we want to address the theory of well-being, we want to empower young participants with a mixture of tools which will allow them not only to educate others about well-being, but also apply them in practice for themselves, their families, nearest neighbourhoods, etc.
All of the activities planned for the project have one objective - to promote the social and personal development of young people. This is the reason behind our topic (well-being of young people) as well as programme and the methods planned. Young people will be directly involved in the process and implementation of activities. The fact that our methodology will be based on non-formal education, will assure not only focus on individual development of every single participant, but also create an opportunity to challenge them (participants), take them out of their comfort zones, to maximise the impact of learning-by-doing.
We seek to train 64 participants (32 in each of the two courses) in the principles of well-being (issues, concept and measures) as well as with practical tools and methods of how young people could be educated about well-being. Why two courses? Because we have received a high number of quality enquiries about partnership in this project, which allows us to approach a bigger number of young people from different European countries. Participants will be volunteers, youth workers and/or activists from local NGOs directly working on youth empowerment in different local settings in Europe.
We hope that the ultimate result of this project will be a group of 64 highly motivated and empowered individuals who will draw inspiration from the educational experience we plan to offer in order to use it in their own organisations. The aim of this project is to put all of the ideas, tools and methods in practice in order to educate young people on well-being. Although we aim at the empowerment of 64 individuals, we hope that the project’s reach will exceed 600 and will impact all possible local communities. We will also encourage participants to design and then implement their own well-being based projects, thus increasing the impact beyond Forest of Dean/partnership organisations!
The project will take place in the ASHA Centre, at the edge of the Forest of Dean, in an environment that is health giving, intentionally designed to be therapeutic, beautiful and inspiring.