„YOUNG COMMUNITY ORGANISERS“

“YOUNG COMMUNITY ORGANISERS”

Nowadays only the minority of young people are members of youth organisations who claim to be the key speakers of all European youths. Only a minority has knowledge and skills to help people solve some of the many problems that our society is struggling with. However this situation can be changed for the better.

During the first step of KA2 project “YOUNG COMMUNITY ORGANISERS” 24 young people from Italy, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey gathered together to gain knowledge about Alinsky’s theory. It claims that a community organiser should be a community`s outsider withn an external view, help build the community and slowly step out handing over the process to the community, and such a role fits perfectly to a youth worker. Community Organising means tacking communities which are subject to injustice and organise them to identify among themselves the resources to accomplish justice and fairness, in other words Community here is a synonym to solidarity.

Together with the help of the trainers Lorenzo Nava, Urania Rapti and Tiziano Tomassini participants discovered how to act as community leaders, organisers, provide innovative leadership and organisational competencies. They learnt the tools and theories that would allow them to act locally as community organisers and then empower the target group subsequently to act independently and also empower next communities to do the same. The programme also presented participants an opportunity to understand how to set goals, follow through and self-motivation, elicit virtues and potentials into a client, use a coaching linguistics, delivering open and powerful questions and active listening. As an outcome of the project, participants were provided with community organizers competences and equipped to act in order to identify local leaders and empower their leadership motivation and competences.

Together with gaining essential knowledge about community organising, participants had an opportunity to get to know more about each other`s countries, traditions and even to demonstrate how to cook some traditional dishes of their countries. Moreover, they could enjoy the beautiful “Castelletto Sopra Ticino”, location of the training course that is surrounded by amazing Italian landscapes.