The current project proposal focuses on supporting continuing professional development of the youth workers, who are a must precondition for youth development and addressing youth issues especially on dealing with an increasing diversity of learners, learners with disadvantaged backgrounds, more specifically unemployed young people, young offenders and young people with chronic diseases. This will include building effective partnership between the partnering countries youth personal development organizations, as well as the development of programmes, modules and Handbook with good practices in the field of youth work with unemployed young people, young offenders and young people with chronic diseases. All this aims to strengthen their further development and life-long learning, helping them to built partnerships with their colleagues from the other countries in a long term and sustainable way. We aim to built key competencies in the youth workers that will make them successful in the field youth work with young people with disadvantaged back ground, that will make them successful in any situation of work with youth population. We want to raise the awareness and promote on a national, regional and international level the benefits, advantages and sustainable results that non-formal learning brings. Raising this awareness we aim to address more young people join a personal development program or start their extracurricular activity on one hand and on the other - inform and communicate to the business and government sector the specific benefits and developed competencies through the non-formal learning. Being aware of its benefits the business and the government sector will be more adequate, the business in their recruitment process and corporate social responsibility activities, that should be considered as in investment in their future employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders. The Government in their education and labor policy development and implementation. This project is a combination of already existing methods of personal development programme for youth, that has proved its success and results for the last 60 years, but in the same time escalate and enrich the youth workers competencies and experience by developing more tools and approaches, so that they can address target groups that are hard to be reached and worked with. Apart of developing new training methods we use learning by doing approach in order to collect the best know-how, good practices and information for the targeted groups. Analyzing and aligning between the three countries the results, the good practices and successful stories will be collected in a Handbook for Quality Youth work that would serve not only the future work of the 3 partners, but all organizations they are working with, the other countries where the Award program exists (currently more than 140) as well as all youth organizations specialized in the youth work field.
The partner organisations in this project decided to undertake the activities based on their previous experience with the three target groups of it - young people with chronic diseases, unemployed young people and young offenders with the aim to collect, exchange, test and improve good practices in the field of quality youth work with disadvantaged young people. Our main principle is personal development, and fulfilment which we believe should be available to every young person regardless of their background. Our mission is to provide young people with support and mentorship matched to their own needs and this is why it is important to us to have specific approach for young people with disadvantages. The three partnering organisations, The Duke of Edinburgh's International Award - Bulgaria, The Duke of Edinburgh's International Award - Romania and EPI Mednarodno priznanje za mlade Zavod za podporo in vsestranski razvoj mladih, Slovenia are all focused on delivering mentorship programmes to young people with specific focus on personal development, volunteering, healthy lifestyle and appreciation of consistency and goal-setting. Each organisation has experience delivering the programme for young people from different disadvantaged groups and decided to exchange good practices and approaches, in order to include more young people with specific needs into the personal development programmes. The partner organisations have very similar structure but focus on different target groups - each organization trains their own youth workers (be it teachers, NGO-staff, volunteers, etc) and facilitates and supports the work of the youth workers with the young people. The specific objectives of the project were: 1. Collection of good practices from 3 countries and developing a training modules for youth work with unemployed young people, young offenders and young people with chronic diseases. 2. Implementing the good practices in the field of youth work with unemployed young people, young offenders and young people with chronic diseases. 3. Developing a handbook, that collects the 12 good practices and training activities in the field of youth work with unemployed young people, young offenders and young people with chronic diseases, that aims to improve the quality of the youth work on national, regional and international level and promote its results and advantages. The direct target group were the youth workers - who participated in learning activities, development of the good practices and shared their specific experience and know-how. We managed to built a sustainable pool of qualified youth workers who are capable of, motivated and eager to work with young people from mentioned 3 target grouts. Another indirect target group for this project are young disadvantaged people, more specifically unemployed, young offenders and young people with chronic diseases. The youth workers who will be working directly with them by providing them guidelines, mentoring and coaching them in the process of personal development. In the framework of the project, the partners joined forces to design a 5day training for trainers with a specific focus on working with disadvantaged young people. Most of the sessions used in the training and in the later trainings for youth workers can be found in the Handbook (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hReH0Fo-F5DPRzvWretiuzQuW5tFeWog/view) and are available for anyone who would like to use them. What is more, the Handbook includes good practices which were tested by the partners, which can be directly applied with young people or can be adapted according to the needs of the group. Additionally, there are 54 youth workers trained in this methodology who are already mentoring young people from disadvantaged backgrounds - most of the youth workers are working with at least 2 young people in their first year as mentors and are expected to work with progressively higher numbers in hte next years. In the long term, the Handbook with good practices and methodology will be used by the partner countries in the training of youth workers and mentors and will multiply the number of young people, engaged in personal development programmes and thus becoming independent and an integral part of their communities.