Project Approved: “Innovative Coaching makes the Difference”, Erasmus+ KA2

We have good news!
In the following 2 years along with our partners from Bulgaria, India, Italy, Kenya and Vietnam we will work on the Erasmus+ KA2 project for empowering the young people to reach their full potential and successfully enter the labor market in their countries.

Innovative Coaching makes the Difference takes shape within a difficult economic climate of stagnated growth that affects global employment prospects. Due to recent global gloomy economic climate and job scarcity, young people are the hardest hit with unemployment in comparison with adults. For these reasons, the project tries to compensate this inequality of opportunities through capacity building by means of youth work and youth empowerment by develop youth workers’ coaching competences through the use of traditional games collected from all project’s countries as non-formal education tools.

The project seeks to boost the quality of youth work as a constructive response to youth integration, and participation in the labor market, as well as positive identity consolidation by means of personal guidance and work-orientation in order to help young NEETs reach their full potential and successfully enter the labor market in their countries.

Objectives

• Promote ​cooperation between youth from Programme and Partner countries for an effective, multifaceted response and final outcomes on youth work, which is often underdeveloped in Africa or South East Asia.
• Equip 30 youth workers from 6 project countries with innovative working tools: ​coaching competences for youth and particularly how to use traditional outdoors games to design their coaching activities.
• Add and build a synergy between ​culture – coaching – game philosophy​, and orientation to labour market for personal coaching and career guidance advice, where a person’s performance could be enahanced by training with games, and could be taken as an indicator for their performance in real life context.
• Increase the attractiveness and international dimension of participating youth organisations with new, interesting toolkit for youth work so that they are able to offer activities and programmes that better respond to the needs of individuals and thus extend their presence and influence among local youth.
• ​Diffuse the project results and products compiled in the Coaching Manual to other international organisations with an Open Educational Resource platform, as well as their embedded European values and initiatives (European Solidarity Corps, among others).

Main activities
The above aim shall be reached through the development of an innovative coaching methods designed with traditional games (Coaching Manual), together with a Competence-mapping tool to provide the base for coaching interventions. The project cycle during its lifetime of 20 months will include:
– Kick-off meeting (Macedonia)
– Training Course (Italy)
– Testing Workshops (all countries)
– Job Shadowing (all countries)
– Local Seminars (all countries)
– Final Conference (India).

Impact
The most relevant is the impact on the beneficiaries themselves:
– Their transversal skills – specifically coaching and career counselling skills will be improved
– Their knowledge on career guidance, job market demand and opportunities will be extended
– Their awareness about the flexibility and versatility of NFL will be improved.

Participant organizations will develop their capacity on implementing training programs with youth in rural context using the specific tool of coaching through traditional games as well as important issues such as project implementation, international cooperation, and strategic development.