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Innovation and creativity in community actions
Start date: Oct 5, 2016, End date: Apr 4, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The youth exchange will concentrate on the topic of innovation by extending the knowledge on how to create ideas and how to implement these new ideas among young people in the local communities. Thus, the exchange will aim to inspire partcipants’ thinking innovatively, rather than be dependent on the status quo. This innovative aspect of thinking will open up new opportunities, give way to an array of creative solutions and help to rethink the exisiting obstacles that hinder the achievement of the desired educational outcomes in the youth field, in promoting the active citizenship at the local level and in implementing new projects. Creative thinking will help to understand how to overcome fears and discouragement that one may experience if facing a challenge, whatever the obstacles: physical or social. The project will bring together partner organizations from the UK, Bulgaria, Portugal, Estonia, and Latvia. The exchange will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria. Each country will be represented by 12 young people and 2 youth peer leaders. The idea can be further developed in local projects after the exchange and serve as an inspiration for developing follow-up projects by the participants who will establish new contacts for future co-operation. Furthermore, the participants will be introduced to a set of brand new methods and tools for generating ideas and developing strategies for successful project implementation, get familiarized with the basic tools in project making/project management. The exchange will shed light on the objectives, strategies, project phases and evaluation guidelines and enable the participants to share their best practices and start the process of developing ideas for future co-operations.The target group for this exchange is young people with lesser socio-economic opportunities motivated to improve their knowledge, skills and understanding to play an effective role in society, to become visible as a members of their communities. In addition, these young people are motivated to become more self-confident and develop a sense of responsibility for themselves as well as their surroundings. Their careful selection is one of the main aspects of this youth exchange to be taken care of by all the partner organisations.The approach used during the exchange itself will be workshop based, which will include discussions, sharing of ideas and practical activity e.g. role play, world café, open spaces etc. to aid learning. Young people from partner groups will also prepare artistic, creative workshops in a medium of their own choice. This will not only provide opportunities for exploring the theme of active citizenship but will also act as a means of inclusion and intercultural learning as they are prepared to run the workshops with mixed nationality groups and also to publicise it to the local young people and public in the vicinity of the exchange. This will also ensure that the young people have been involved in the design and implementation of the programme.The exchange will have a strong non-formal empowerment / training dimension pursued in workshops of World Café, Open Spaces and other strong non-formal education tools. These tools will aim to introduce participants to concepts such as citizenship, human rights, diversity, democracy and civil society.We believe that this project can greatly contribute to the personal development of participants. In the series of workshops participants will learn:- using imagination to consider the situation of others;- about the barriers to volunteering and active citizenship and ways to overcome those barriers;- analysing the role of community;- the difference between positive and negative action;- that everyone can make a difference;- the variety of ways in which a person can be an active citizen.This project will also have a strong European dimension and stimulate reflection on the emerging European society and its values. European dimension of the project will be developed by all the partners together, as they intend to extend such projects among young people of multinational communities, basing on interlinked educational activities. Non-formal educational means taken from online SALTO Toolbox and Booklets and adapted for goals of the exchange. This is done to raise disadvantaged young people’s awareness of European problems and to show how these young people may participate in creating new, united Europe.We are expecting that the workshops will develop a range of innovative ideas for active citizenship through volunteering. The young people will also develop new project teams which may lead to future activities through the Erasmus+ programme. The report team will present the documented content of the exchange to participants to disseminate it for their youth organisations in the form of further presentations and follow up sessions.

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