From January 18 to 26, I participated in a partnership building meeting in Romania. The event itself was called “From Rural to Plural” and was aimed at drawing the attention of youth workers and volunteers to the problem of working with young people in rural areas. The event was attended by representatives of youth organizations to find new partnerships and simply share experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During these days, the organizers held many interesting and informative sessions. On the first days we got to know each other and organized into international teams. The following days were more lecture-based, where the organizers talked about their experience in working with rural youth. They also invited a speaker who spoke about the stages of creating their youth organization and all the difficulties of working with youth and the authorities in the village. On the third day, everyone presented their organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the last days, we discussed future joint projects and were inspired to cooperate. In addition, each participant presented the culture and traditions of their country at a cultural evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Overall, this exchange left only good and warm memories. I believe that everyone should try to join such a mobility at least once in their life, because I was able to: practice my English, make new friends, learn a lot of new information about the participating countries and even learn a few phrases in Albanian and Romanian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anna-Maria Mykhailiuk, Director of the Youth Center, Zhuravne Village Council, Lviv Region<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On this meeting, I was able to communicate with organizations from across Europe that work with rural youth, gain a deeper understanding of the European Youth Village program, develop skills in working with youth and strategic development of youth projects, and exchange experiences with other participants. This was my first experience of this kind, and I was surprised to find that we all face the same problems in working with rural youth, regardless of whether you work in Georgia or Slovakia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each day involved team building and the development of various competencies, after which you start to reconsider your work with rural youth and plan your future activities. I learned a lot of new practices in youth work during this meeting. My greatest achievement after this experience is that I have gained a new perspective on youth work and its planning, and now I see how the work of the youth center has improved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kateryna Bezhynar, youth worker at the NGO “KIEC “European Club”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s easy to write about impressions of a youth exchange, but it’s much harder to write about how the partnership-building activity went. In particular, because it’s impossible to say for sure whether our exchange of contacts will have a result: whether we will have joint projects in the future, whether the exchange of contacts was just a kind gesture, and whether your data was saved so that people can remember exactly who they shouldn’t do something with \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n I spent January 18-26 in the village of Shimon (in Romania, not far from Brasov). It was the first time I participated in an activity of this kind, so I didn’t know what to expect. The fact that I knew the organizers (as it turned out, this is how the partnership works) helped me to be less nervous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At first, everything seemed like a regular youth exchange, but with each passing day, the theme of the meeting, “From Rural To Plural,” was revealed more and more. If you translate it into Ukrainian (and some other languages), it doesn’t make sense. But the point is to try to establish work with young people from rural areas. Not only in Ukraine, but also in other countries, youth workers face problems. For example, not many villages have youth centers; projects often do not have funding to cover the cost of travel for youth workers or young people; and, in general, people in rural areas are not always ready to let a stranger into the community to conduct activities. During the sessions, we shared information about how things work in our countries, looked for commonalities and differences, and tried to find solutions to some problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First of all, as always, there was team building. We got to know each other personally, talked about ourselves and learned about others. We also talked about our expectations, fears, and our possible contribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was quite valuable to learn about the experience of a Romanian organization in rural areas, including success stories and lessons learned from the head of a youth center that was recently opened in the village. We also learned about the European Youth Village program. After these sessions, I decided to apply for the EU4Youth Alumni Network project, where I selected young people from rural areas as the target audience for my activities (by the way, my participation was confirmed, and now I am trying to think of my own small project to help as many rural youth as possible become active and gain the experience I gained through the Erasmus+ program).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later in the program, we represented our organizations. After that, I became terribly proud of myself, and my faith in myself skyrocketed. Even though I know that my English is not perfect (far from it), I was once again able to overcome myself, speak in front of everyone alone, and even tell them about our organization with dignity. After the NGO fair, some of the participants came up to me and said that they liked my presentation (and I still hope that it was not because they felt sorry for me, but because it was true).<\/p>\n\n\n We also had sessions where we discussed methods of working in the community, Roger Hart’s ladder of participation, rules of communication with young people, and a method with an algorithm for solving certain problems called Design Thinking. This information was not new to me personally, but it was useful to us in our further work together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then we talked about the problems of youth workers and young people from rural areas. Based on the problems of young people that we would like to solve, all participants divided into groups and worked on common projects. And, accordingly, we then presented these projects to other groups, received valuable feedback from other participants and from the facilitators.<\/p>\n\n\n For me personally, an important part of traveling abroad is spreading information about the war in Ukraine. Thanks to the fact that we had a cultural evening, we were able to tell which territories are occupied, that the war has not lasted for 2 years and how we live now. I know how difficult it is to understand us, so I am very grateful to each participant for their attention to this issue, support and faith in us.<\/p>\n\n\n In addition to the program, the trip to Bran Castle was valuable to me (although I asked the vampires there to bite me already because the clock was ticking, but they didn’t). It was also great to communicate with youth workers from Ukraine (although Anya and I knew each other, this trip helped us learn more. I hope that we will have common projects someday).<\/p>\n\n\n It was extremely nice to see representatives of the Romanian organization again, as well as to meet representatives of other organizations from different countries. And I believe that if we exchanged contacts, it was for further common projects, not to remember who we shouldn’t do something in cooperation with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" About the search for vampires, foreign partners and ideas for working with young people from rural areas Valeria Bannik, member of the “Second Floor” youth space team From January 18 to 26, I participated in a partnership building meeting in Romania. The event itself was called “From Rural to Plural” and was aimed at drawing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":6110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,21],"tags":[103,146,215],"class_list":["post-6138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-youth_en","category---en","tag-erasmus-en","tag-kremenchuk-en","tag-youth-exchange-en"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF6310-1-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF7329-1-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF7581-1-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF8196-1-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/IMG_7351-1-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/IMG_7359-1-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF7351-1-576x1024.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/IMG_7477-3-576x1024.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF7396-1-1024x576.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF7662-2-1024x576.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/DSCF7301-1-1024x576.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/WhatsApp-Image-2024-01-22-at-12.16.44-2-edited.jpeg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/IMG_7169-1-1-1024x683.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/prostir.org.ua\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/IMG_7199-2-edited.jpg\")