Young eco facilitators for the sustainable future Erasmus Project

Project Title

Young eco facilitators for the sustainable future

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

The project duration was 2 years. From planning to executing the whole idea was a complex and interesting learning process for everyone. The background of the project was the common understanding of the eco aspect that all partners consider as a high priority in their daily work, and the focus on developing the skills of the young people. The project came alive by the common desire and recognition that facilitation as a skill is needed in youth work, but what was our special focus and innovative approach is, to combine the skills of facilitation with the deep focus on the sustainability, and eco aspect. Eco aspect means the mindset and approach towards our environment, and the connection to the surroundings and closer and loser environment around us, where we live in. In the youth field, and in the non formal education we consider facilitation is one of the most important role in order to make the activity flow perfect. We saw that there are plenty of people who are facilitators, yet not all of them understand fully the complexity of facilitation. We did our best to prepare and pass our knowledge and experience on facilitation to participants.

Our objectives were improving youth work, and provide cross sectoral cooperations between local schools and NGOs.
During the activities we gave the experience and knowledge to the participants to learn the skills of facilitation, and also take home the eco and sustainable approach. We managed this by training 40 both leaders with a tailor made content on the methods of facilitation, in theory and practise and also keeping a special focus on the environmental mindfulness. Besides the training, we provided personalised coaching to each of the participants. It meant a regular check up, and support, and preparation for their local activities, as well, answering all their questions regarding the horizontal topics we touched such as human-ecology, sustainable development and environmental consciousness.
One of the results of the project was that during the local activities, the participants practiced their facilitator skills by teaching and explaining to their peers why is it good to think a bit before we act, or think a bit about the consequences globally about our daily decisions. This message is important, to make awareness in young age already that in our daily routine everything has some global impact.

The uniqueness of this project was, besides the environmental friendly approach, and focus, but also the combination of the physical learning, and the online learning as well. After the training, the participants kept in touch and shared their experience on the blog, and in the Facebook group. The feedbacks were positive about this shared follow up method. The local activities were also big success. There was a big variety of the activities, from smaller workshops till participation on festivals. Even though the activities were different, but the aim was that the participants could facilitate the event, and at the same time share their knowledge about sustainability and environmental mindfulness with their fellow peers. This happened successfully in almost every case. The coaches had to help in many cases to find the right activities, and sometimes pair up some participants with each other. In some partner organisation the local cooperation was stronger than in others. This was also a big learning for us as coordinators as well, as partner selection.

As 2 intellectual outputs we created a tangible guidebook with numerous methodology, as well as an online platform, that functions on mobile devicese as well as on computer. There was some last minute changes in the second intellectual output, after testing the usability. In the last minute, after running testings, that we change the form of the online surface, from a mobile application, to an online platform, that can be used both on the mobile devices as well as on the computer.
Impact wise, we are happy to say that we have managed to meet our primarliy impact goals, on the participants, on the partner organisations, as well as on us, and also already see the impacts on the indirect audience as well. We measure the impact during the project on the participants, and by constant feedbacks to each other, we also followed the development on the partnership as well. We gain knowledge about the indirect participants, by their reach out, and feedbacks we have gotten already, by want to use our intellectual outputs, and also we got invitations for future collaborations as well.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 89297 Eur

Project Coordinator

Szatyor Közösség a Környezettudatos ÉletmódTámogatásáért Egyesület & Country: HU

Project Partners

• TANDEM n.o.
• Asociacion Medra
• ASOCIATIA DE TINERI DIN ARDEAL