Thursday, June 8, 2017

Day four: youth participation and developing new methods

What? How? Why? These were the main three questions we started our day 4 – 8th of June, 2017 in Vidrike. We are working with youth, or are on a way to work with them and we are putting our hearts to this every day, though we sometimes forget to ask ourselves these three questions regarding the work with youth.



This time we didn't try to find answers to these questions based on our organisation and our-work-connected people, but at our personal level. What are you personally doing during your days? How do you do it, which kind of tools do you have, what kind of resources do you use? And most important question is WHY do you do it? How do you keep up the good work and motivation every single day? What is the aim of doing it? These were the questions to find answers in our first session.

Nobody will ever get great in something without guidance, without trainer or a coach giving you some directions and tips. Particularly coaching was the main thing that we had a chance to practice during the second session. We gathered within the group people, that we feel the most comfortable to be with, mapped what we are doing every day and what are the main problems occurred so far. We were not only mentioning the problems, but we were also going deeper – what are the main reasons, that are the goals, obstacles, why and how these problems occurred and what are the main options to solve them. Because it is hard to ,,erase´´ them instantly, we were trying to come out with possible long-term solutions. It was definitely a great opportunity to open ourselves to the others and to think about possible solutions which could really work in our actual situation.


After that we were asked to create our own new method of active youth participation. It had to be something realistic that we can actually use in our own organisations. We were divided into groups of 5 members each and we had around 90 minutes to come up with our idea and develop it into complete description of our method. Our group chose a method addressing the need to practice critical thinking. Using this method youngsters can develop their experience in critical thinking and therefore we can increase its use among young people. After that each team had to share it´s own method with the others and also to post it to the facebook group so everybody can use it after the course in the future work.

Luckily, we had again a beautiful, not really typical Estonian weather, so we could also explore peaceful and soul-nourishing surrounding of our training course place in Vidrike. 






On this day, we had probably the most important thing during the whole project, the main event, which can be even considered as a sightseeing by the foreign people from abroad of Estonia – THE SAUNAPARTY! While sauna is normal for Estonians, it was really interesting to see how foreigners (because for some of them it was the very first time in sauna) took the preparations for it (drinking water to no get dehydrated etc) and were asking serious questions about it to educate themselves. Some of us were even so brave, that we jumped from the sauna directly to lake:


We have a really cool bunch of people here and I am pretty sure that some great projects and cooperation will be generated here during these days for our future work within the field of youth work. But while working hard on our professional development during these days, we don´t forget to have a fun! You can see it also in following energizer ;) :


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