Programme and action: ERASMUS+ programme, Key Action 1: Training course
Dates: 2-10 May 2015
Venue: Rio Maior, Arrouquelas, Portugal
Participants: Bronislav Vysloužil, Ondřej Podlešák
Please read the project info-pack.
Project report:
Project “Manage the future, build partnerships” was held by H20 organisation from Portugal. AND IT WAS AWESOME. To Rio Maior, City roughly 100 kilometers north of Lisboa, participants from Czech republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova came together to enjoy a week full of fun and mainly to get some new information and knowledge to use with their NGOs.
Alex, the organiser from this organisation, is the best guy you can ever meet. Even though his english his not perfect, hes able to get everything done. He is very nice guy, who does everything he can to make participants of his course happy. One example for all: In daily evaluation, one person said she would like a yoghurt for breakfast. Since they, for every breakfast there were plenty of yoghurts. The accomodation was very comfortable, in rooms with 2 to 3 beds. Food was great, wide variety of choices provided. Also, we were invited by Alex to a nice restaurant for dinner four nights.
The training process was led by Georgi, experienced trainer from Gorgia. He was very professional and handled everything perfectly and still was fun to be around. Through the course, we learned many important thinks from groupwork cooperation to leadership. But the objective of the course was to teach the participants how to “manage the future”. The last four days, we were working as hard as possible. All people made a great job to motivate us in working hard in groups we could have chosen by ourselves depending on our intrests, goals of our organisations and target groups we share.
The process was not theoretical, but very practical, which was really useful. Our Czecho-Ukraine team decided to write an application for course called “From movement to improvement”, which should teach young leaders the skills needed to live a healthy lifestlyle, and give them opportunity to interest their peers in joining them. Writing the application form was very challenging, but we had a great team and a lot of help from both Georgi and Alex. Alex also gave us very important tips on how to describe objective and Georgi taught us how to create a “problem tree”, which describes roots of problems and bad food they produce – consequences of the main problem. This methods were useful for writing the project.
Another very important part of this course was networking. We met a lot of people interested in youth education and we will hopefully establish cooperation in the future. Maybe some friendships were started, and certainly some partnerships. All the participants were dedicated to course topic and interested in learning as much as possible which created a great enviroment. So good job by national agencies or Alex to choose the right participants.
The project was finished with a visit to Lisboa with sightseeing and a great dinner in steak restaurant. Thanks to all people who were there and I will hopefully have a chance to visit another project hosted by Alex and the H20 organisation or led by Georgi as a trainer.
Ondřej Podlešák