One of the most actual challenges of youth work is work in intercultural environment. It is essential for youth organizations to develop capacities of their members to deliver quality youth work in intercultural settings. Ambiguity is everywhere, among young people and between young person and youth worker. It is essential nowadays to develop and improve our intercultural competence with emphasis on intercultural sensitiveness because we don’t have to travel to another country to face with different culture, different cultures come to us, and different cultures are around us. That is a really positive change nevertheless we have to learn to handle our fears and learn to understand, tolerate and accept each other and to learn to live together. Youth workers have to be prepared for that and provide support for young people they work with to become intercultural sensitive for each other and go through the phases of intercultural sensitiveness and understand their and others’ reactions. The project ‘Enabling Youth Workers to Work in Intercultural Sensitive Environment’ will consist from two activities (training course and seminar) implemented with goal to reach following project objectives:- Develop capacities of youth workers to deliver quality youth work in intercultural working environment;- To raise knowledge of the youth workers on theoretical concepts reflecting the work in intercultural environment including theory of Milton J. Bennett: Developmental model of intercultural sensitiveness;- To develop and to improve intercultural competence of youth workers through the model as recognizing phases of the model: Ambiguity; Getting to know other culture; Understand other culture; Tolerance of differences; Acceptance of differences; Appreciation of diversity; Adaptation; Ability to function in other culture;- To support developing new projects and initiatives responding on the need of youth workers to develop set of competencies needed to work in intercultural environment; - To invent new Key Action 2 Capacity Building projects for young people and youth workers on intercultural sensitiveness according to the proposals of Erasmus + Programme;- To provide the participants an opportunity to share practices, to reflect on common challenges in the field of working in intercultural environment. By reaching the objectives the partner’s organization coming from Macedonia, Argentina and Denmark will increase their abilities to raise awareness on intercultural sensitiveness among other stakeholders, especially young people.
Overall aim of the project ‘Enabling Youth Workers to Work in Intercultural Sensitive Environment’ was to train youth workers, youth leaders, teachers, social workers, etc. on use of the Milton J. Bennett model of intercultural sensitivity in their daily work and lives in order to improve their intercultural competence to work with different target groups including e.g. minorities, immigrants or Roma young people. The project ‘Enabling Youth Workers to Work in Intercultural Sensitive Environment’ included three mobility activities (meeting, training course and seminar). The activities took place in Argentina, Republic of Macedonia and Denmark and reflected following project objectives:- Getting acquainted with the theory of Milton J. Bennett: Developmental model of intercultural sensitiveness;- Develop and improve intercultural competence through the model as recognising phases of the model: Ambiguity; Getting to know other culture; Understand other culture; Tolerance of differences; Acceptance of differences; Appreciation of diversity; Adaptation; Ability to function in other culture;- Develop board game aiming to increase intercultural sensitiveness among young people, with special focus to be paid to the future EVS volunteers and young people taking part in mobility projects;- Invent new Key Action 1 and Key Action 2 projects for young people and youth workers as youth exchanges and EVS for young people, trainings for youth workers on intercultural sensitiveness according to the proposals of Erasmus + Programme and capacity building activities for organizations;-Promote Erasmus + Programme in the Partner Country, in Argentina together with raising awareness on the importance of European values and cooperation among involved countries.Partners on this Projects are: Danish intercultural Organization, Youth Council Next Generation, Asociation Civil Familia Gangitana de Rosario. Besides mobility activities the project included visibility and dissemination activities including dissemination of key project products: booklet of good practices and board game on intercultural sensitiveness giving to young people getting ready for first mobility activity, future international volunteers, as well as young people living in diverse cultural environment an opportunity to develop their intercultural sensitiveness. Key project products and lessons learned are available on project blog, link: http://eywwise.ka2project.net/ Summary of the main results:1.Network between participating organizations ‘Next Generation’, Republic of Macedonia, ‘Danish Intercultural organization’, Denmark and ‘Asociacion Civil Famila Gangitana De Rosario’, Argentina strengthen through mobility activities (meeting, training course and seminar) and activities leading to creating board game on intercultural sensitivity and to other project products;2.Strengthen capacities of the organizations to implement international, regional and local activities, including activities implemented with support under Erasmus + Programme, KA 2; 3.Raised capacities of 30 representatives of participating organizations through international mobility activities to effectively use the model of intercultural sensitivity at their work with young people;4.Board game based on model of intercultural sensitivity developed and available on following link: http://eywwise.ka2project.net/board-game/ 5.Booklet gathering lessons learned, good practices created and available on project blog, EU dissemination platform: http://eywwise.ka2project.net/booklet/