Search for European Projects

Youth and sustainable democracy - Create a place for young people for personal development and through active participation can make decisions based on true citizenship
Start date: May 1, 2016, End date: Dec 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Kolding Youth School has existed for 50 years and manage the youth activities for some 5000 youngsters between 13 and 18 in the municipality of Kolding. We have both extensive and intensive experience arranging, organizing and executing activities for youngsters ranging from small groups to several hundred. We will give the youngsters the chance to know how they can improve their democratic involvement and personal skills. We will also encourage the youngsters to think active participation, decision making and personal development. Inthis to create a place for youngsters where they can make descisions based on true citizenship and self-empowerment. Kolding Youth School and in Denmark in general working with youngsters and participation is an important item on the agenda and we have a lot of experience in the area. We have learned that participating in a democratic organization, institution or another grouping, where you are able to have your opinion heard and argue for it and work on different given tasks, strengthen and develop young people’s skills. It does not matter, if what youngsters decide is to participate in is a political youth party, the school council or the board of the small local soccer club. No matter what they engage in they will gain from it. The way our society is today and how you are getting an education, does not ensure you, that you have a golden ticket to get a job. There is no guarantee and the competition is getting harder. This is actually the main reason, we chose to work with this area in our organization and also for this Demo-Youth Exchange, which is a recurring activity every second year with different themes. To motivate more youngsters to participate we hear the youngsters in our organization say, that it is vital to create an awareness amongst youngsters of what they can gain from active participating. Furthermore they will have the chance of getting tools to know where they can find information, establish knowledge and then enhance more active participation in society, improveing learning performance and finally to increase self-empowerment and self-esteem. This should hopefully increase intercultural awareness and foreign language competences and then achieve greater awareness of the European project and the EU values. But everything has to come from the youngsters themselves - not from the adult youth workers. The partners where selected according to requests prepared by youngsters and youth workers of our organization working on the project, which they considered to be necessary to reach the aim of the project. They came up with four criteria of being a partner from organization. The first thing required and probably the most important thing was. 1)diversity, differences and similarities among the participants. Using our network, new contacts made on TC and YE and Salto we have selected three partner organisations who live up to the request for partners and they all have great knowledge in the field of youth work, are experienced within the field of international exchanges and have high standards of quality for all their activities. 2)have experience with and an interest in the theme of project 3) are reliable 4) are engaged to the project through out the whole process. The methods beeing used during the exchange will be related to non-formal learning and will be taken from the areas of personal development such as ice-breakers, energizers, name games, workshops, team building activities, presentations, etc. The project activities will also include lectures, roleplaying and debating. The activities selected for the project are aimed at encouraging young participants to share their individual perceptions of the basic principles of the subject as well as to present the common perception existing in their countries (which can be identical), and to reflect and work out common position on the topic of the group participating at the exchange in the form of creative presentation. These activities will require from the participants using not only their knowledge but also the chance of developing new skills. All of our activities will try to meet the different learning needs using the walk and talk principals, audiotive learrning, visuel learning, learning by doing and more traditional learning methods.The youth exchange is, for us a way of allowing a group of youngsters from different countries to meet and live together. By extension, we give the youngsters, during the youth exchange and through our draft program of mixed workshops, exercises, debates, role-plays, outdoor activities and teambuilding sessions, the opportunity to carry out personal competences, such as social skills, awareness of socially relevant topics, discover new cultures, habits and lifestyles. Furthermore it will hopefully also give the youngsters the eager to strengthen values like solidarity, democracy and friendship in which we think is an very important lifelong learning outcome.
Up2Europe Ads

Coordinator

Details

3 Partners Participants