The main goal of the Find your path! project is to expand the „playful toolbox” of working with youth communities by developing an exiting board game that summarizes the decades of experience of youth organizations in Lendava, Slovenia and Pécsvárad, Hungary – two small towns – in youth work, responding to regional and national needs. This playful tool can be helpful to any community that has youth work or program implementation in its profile. The problems and opportunity situations which are modeled in the game are helping the involved young people and their communities, or the professionals to practice decision-making and process observation. With practice and the knowledge gained by this game the participants will become bolder and more decisive in real life in similar situations. It helps young people from the formulation of their ideas to their virtual implementation; educators and professionals in supporting youth communities by giving them the opportunity to think through and try out many paths, learning about theoretical consequences, successes or failures, and the opportunity to analyzing the whole process. The game is being developed in collaboration between the Fiatalok a részvételért Egyesület and KUD Lavina – Lavina KK. In the last phase of the project, we will personally present the finished game 6 times to professionals who can use it in their work. In addition, we intend to widely disseminate the fact and availability of the game through the partnership’s existing network of contacts, using both online and traditional communication channels. The game will be available online in three languages (Hungarian, Slovenian and English) unlimited, and in printed form with limited availability. We encourage you to try the game and Find your path!
The first goal of our project was to develop a tool that could be useful for all communities with programme (event) delivery in their profile, regardless of their level of experience: communities that are just starting out and those that are more experienced. With our project, we also aimed to build on our organisational strengths to exchange experiences (FIRE youth community organising; Lavina, pedagogy, drama pedagogy) that would help each other's organisations and communities to develop. Both organisations have professional contacts, which we have shared with each other in the project (FIRE- has a strong professional and civil network, Lavina- has good contacts with student governments), which has allowed us to disseminate the results of the project more widely, leading to further collaborations in the future. One of its main achievements has been to increase the visibility and recognition of the organisations at local level, among target groups and in professional circles. By holding one of the dissemination events locally in the associations' municipalities, to which local professionals (teachers, NGO leaders, community organisers) and young people were invited, in addition to the municipal authorities. In addition, the multiplication events in Maribor, Ljubljana, Pécs and Budapest provided an excellent opportunity for further networking and planning of future joint projects.
The idea is to jointly create a tool that can be used as an exercise among youth and professionals, aiming at acting out different situations and processes that can model situations and events that occur in youth community development. The aim of the exercise is to provide young people, communities and professionals with knowledge transfer, community and play experience, and a taste of local youth community development and youth work practices, thus strengthening their community and the achievement of their goals. The target group of the project: class communities, youth organisations, small communities, youth work professionals, teachers. There are few municipalities where youth work is carried out in a similar way, so our aim was to bring together different levels and types of experience within the project to create a new quality. Lavina's pedagogical, especially drama pedagogical toolkit, the film-theatre experience all contribute to FIRE's experience in local youth work theory and youth self-governance. The knowledge of the two organisations adds up in a way that they complement each other like a puzzle. Cooperation and partnership are also strengthened by differences: different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and experience in local youth work, which can shed light on issues, problems or solutions that are not visible to the other partner.