“New Partnership for New ADEPPA! “, France 2006
On September 23rd 2006, two youth leaders from Together Romania took part in a contact making seminar in Vigy, France. Here they came with the intentions to share ideas, best practices and to establish new partnerships. In total there were 12 different countries being represented (UK, France, Estonia, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Italy, Romania, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Luxembourg) and as you would imagine this made for a very interesting seminar. The first day of the seminar concentrated on getting to know each other, and to break own the initial boundaries between strangers. This was achieved by several name games, ice breakers and energizers. Within no time, everyone was acquainted and names were all known. After this came the time to share best practices and presentations, this gave everyone the opportunity to present what they do, how their organization works and examples of good projects that they had either been involved in or organized. The ideas that were discussed in the seminar were practical information that each participant could take back to their own organization and apply them there. Such things as how to plan a youth exchange, how to use an Action 5 seminar to the best of its ability, how to write application forms, and deadline dates were all discussed and learnt by the participants.
One of the main areas of the seminar was the OST (Open Space Technology). This is a method of working that is very popular and can be used in groups of 20 to 200. The idea is for a selection of participants to lead several workshops on different project ideas throughout different times in the scheduled day. Then the rest of the participants will choose a workshop that interests them the most and join that one, after the allotted time the participants move to their next chosen workshop. During this seminar, there were about 12 workshops, which all concentrated on different topics and potential projects. The feedback sessions that follows the OST, was very well received and a lot of the participants learnt a lot of new ideas. The participants came up with many projects, and more importantly there were many partnerships made between the organizations. The next step that was agreed within the seminar was that the potential partners would all keep in contact about their ideas and thoughts through the contact list.
Together Romania Association 