Youth workers academy is an educational strategic partnership to establish a curriculum and toolkits for youth workers on how to deal with youngsters with fever opportunities from 3 different backgrounds: disabilities, socially deprived background with emphasize on refugees and their integration into society and LGBTQI. Project consists out of 4 international members, Turkey, Croatia, Romania and Slovenia, to empower youth workers to do the social changes in our society. Youth workers often lack skills to deal with youngsters with fever opportunities, especially in local, rural environments. With specific curriculum and toolkits to educate youth workers, we would increase the capability of youth workers to have the right approaches towards youngsters with fever opportunities and find the appropriate ways on how to deal with them to raise their full potential and help them to be more involved in a society. Our aims are to brighten the horizons of youth workers by gaining specific knowledge of how to work with youngsters with fever opportunities and to bring new methods of youth work in youth centers around Slovenia, Turkey, Romania and Croatia. Our goals are to create 3 different curriculum of trainings for youth workers, to transfer good practices from 4 different countries, to visit at least 12 different organizations dealing with youngsters with fever opportunities (3 in each countries), to involve 180 youth workers in 3 pilot trainings (20/training/country) on 3 different topics in each country. One on how to deal with youngsters with disabilities, one dedicated on how to deal with young people with specific social difficulties (special emphasize on refugees and problematic family background, addictions,...) and one to deal with LGBTQI groups. We will launch the toolkits on-line and off-line and organize 12 dissemination events (3 in each country). We will finish with evaluation meeting with all 4 partners involved in the process. Curriculum and toolkits will be used as a yearly trainings in all organizations to empower youth workers and will be upgraded with other specific groups of youngsters with fever opportunities in the future.One of our priorities aims to proffesionalize youth workers and to use them as proffesionals in our work, so not searching for knowledge out of our field, but in the field.
YOUTH WORKERS ACADEMY was an educational and strategic partnership aimed at preparing a curriculum and manuals for youth workers in three areas: young people with special needs; LGBT youth; young people coming from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. The project reflected its internationality in a quality partnership of youth organizations from Turkey, Croatia, Romania and Slovenia. It also proved that it is a response to the need for youth workers from the above-mentioned countries, as they report that they often do not have enough knowledge to work with identified groups, especially in rural areas and places with fewer populations. By preparing specific learning plans – curricula and integrating them into meaningful manuals, we believe that we have made the first steps for higher qualifications of youth workers, presented them with suitable approaches to work with specific groups of young people, and consequently enable young people to get more involved in society and through them youth workers are transferring knowledge and skills in order to find themselves in a better position and raise their potential. Our overall goal was to expand the horizons of youth workers, to train them appropriately to implement the proposed curricula and to enable them to a better access to young people with fewer opportunities through the introduction of new methods of youth work in youth centres in Slovenia, Turkey, Romania and Croatia. The outcome of the project is the curriculum manual, which helps everyone who works with these three specific youth groups. The manual also includes the transfer of good practices between four countries, a visit to 28 external youth organizations, the involvement of over 200 youth workers in pilot training. Over 12 dissemination events were conducted. We started the project with a kick-off meeting and concluded with an evaluation meeting. The curriculum manual remains a lasting result of the project, and the organizations involved would like to continue with the training for youth workers after the completion of the project and, if necessary, upgrade and develop new models in the same partnership. The desire of the partnership was to gather the best team for the development of content in selected areas and in terms of the competencies and experience of the involved youth workers – experts and we believe that the latter has succeeded. For the past two years, the set of quality projects of the team has led to the goals set. New approaches in youth work developed in the project in all four countries (and wider in the EU) constitute a sustainable tool for conducting training sessions and suitable workshops for the integration of young people with special needs who, with regular and quantitative use (methods), offer good foundations for reaching the desired young people and their active inclusion in society. One of the priorities of the project was strengthening our own organizations.