Description
Community regime left a society characterized by social apathy and lack of civic and social values. Currently youth in Romania are lacking the opportunities to get competencies that will help them act as active and responsible citizens in their communities. This project aims at forming 20 IMPACT Community Initiative Clubs for Youth, that will serve 300 kids and youth 12-14 years old and 60 youth workers (IMPACT leaders); the clubs will be meeting on a weekly basis and every 3-4 months will implement 60 community service learning projects that will have 12 000 direct beneficiaries. During their weekly meetings, the youth are learning about the importance of being tolerant towards people of different gender, religion or ethnicity. The youth will explore subjects on anti-discrimination and inclusion of minorities. Through this project we are capacitating our NGO by developing an on-line competency evaluation system and train the senior IMPACT team on fundraising and communication to act as mentors for the larger IMPACT Clubs network in order to ensure the sustainability of the project.
Summary of project results
Children and youth in Romania are lacking opportunities to get competencies that will help them act as active and responsible citizens in their communities. Also, the Romanian educational system does not support teachers in order to implement more activities based on experiential learning, that can be very useful for youth and their learning process which should prepare them for life. The main goal of the project was to empower children and youth to become active citizens, involved in solving their community problems, willing to learn and to develop continuously and becoming aware of their learning process. In order to reach this goal, through this project, the project promoter developed 22 new IMPACT Clubs, where over 600 children got involved and 67 youth workers (IMPACT leaders) conducted "learning by doing” weekly activities, together implementing 60 community service learning projects based on the needs that the youth identified in their communities. For this to happen, the promoter organised six days of training for the preparation of the teachers, provided a mentoring programme for them and supported clubs in doing community service learning projects which they developed. Furthermore, the promoter developed an online competency evaluation system of the youth that were involved in IMPACT programme. Also, promoter's team participated at 2 trainings on fundraising and communication, which are helping them to ensure sustainability and a good functioning of the project and also of the organisation. In the 32,568 hours of volunteer work performed by students and teachers from IMPACT clubs, children and youth learned to be more attentive to the problems of others and to come up with ideas to solve them, to know each other better and build solid friendships based on common interests, to work more as a team, to communicate better, to find support for their projects, to care more about their communities, to be more organised and responsible in doing their tasks.
Summary of bilateral results