PEL team on a training course in Djakovo, Croatia

Between 27th November and 4th of December, Association for Progress, Education and Lobbying – PEL, represented by Aleksandar, Rijad and Sefer, had the opportunity to participate on the training course “Stay Tuned”, organized by the Croatian branch of CET Platform.

Aleksandar, one of our representatives on the project shared his impression of the training course and what it was about.

The project was organized in a small town in the Slavonia region of Croatia, named DJakovo. We were accommodated in a hotel called “The Lagon” which was located close to the facility where we had the workshops. Besides the Macedonian team and the host country of Croatia, there were 18 other participants from France, Poland, Italy, Romania, Lithuania and Czech Republic.

The main objective of the training was to prepare youth workers and young leaders to run all kind of visibility measures, campaigns and try out different communication methods with target groups in order to raise active participation from young people, raise awareness about the EU, try to encourage young people to become active entrepreneurs and show them how to be in touch with any other activities that may reflect concerns of youth in Europe nowadays.

Various non-formal education working methods were used throughout the 7 days the course lasted , including brainstorming, discussions, debates, simulations, work in small groups, presentations, which served to give us, the participants, a better understanding of how to research about and identify the possible target groups, which ways of communication to use to reach them with our message and the best ways to get the target group motivated to change some aspects of society for better.

Also we gained some insight how to talk to the media, test our public speaking abilities, mind our body-language and much more! We even had the opportunity to implement some of these newly acquired skills when we were given the chance to organize a real campaign, in which we were supposed to raise awareness among Djakovo residents about HIV/AIDS on the World AIDS Day, day that coincided with the days of the course.

For the end of this course, as with every Erasmus+ funded project, during our last day we were presented valuable information about what is the Erasmus+ Programme, it’s opportunities, it’s targets and goals, and to experience the programme just a little bit better, we had the chance to develop some project ideas with the participants from the other partner countries participating in this course, in order to strengthen the possibilities about future cooperation between us, a possibility for which all of us, participants, expressed hope will come to fruition.

– Aleksandar Jovanoski