Competences and skills obtained after one-week intensive training on project management.

Yana Popkostova

In the Training Course on Volunteer Resource Management I had the objective to acquaint myself better with the youth programmes around Europe and the opportunities for volunteer work provided to young people. My aim was to meet young people from different countries, with diverse backgrounds and cultures, to learn from their volunteer experience, and to share ideas and expertise with them. Furthermore, I wanted to get more practical knowledge presented in non-formal way about the process of volunteer work, from the development of the project, through recruitment of volunteers, to its finalization. I also acquainted myself with different strategies of conflict resolution, time management, and networking. After this training course I consider myself better prepared to meet the challenges of preparing and organizing youth volunteer projects.

The Training Course on Volunteer Resource management gave me in addition to the academic knowledge on project management the opportunity to meet and interact with people from different countries who had different worldviews and perspectives than me. This was extremely useful for me since I learnt even better to work together in team with different people, to make compromises and to understand worldviews which are contradictory to mine. I feel my social skills improved after this training course regarding ability to talk, interact, work, and play with diverse people and to communicate with them even without knowing each other’s language.

The Training Course gave me a lot of useful information and background on how to be more active and motivated in developing youth programmes, and on how to be successful in motivating young people to participate in youth initiatives. My civic consciousness is improved now in regards to the need of young people to represent their interests in the policy-making domain and to influence decision-making. After this course I am more aware of the rights and power young people can have in their hands in regards to developing initiatives and projects with universal importance, such as anti-racism campaigns, environmental projects, youth networks and parliaments, etc. After the Course on Volunteer resource management I know my rights as a young person and I feel better prepared and encouraged to participate actively and to promote greater participation by my peers in various youth initiatives.

The Training Course on Volunteer Resource Management gave me valuable insights into how to organize and develop youth initiatives by myself. I learnt how to recruit volunteers, how to answer to their needs and provide them secure and ambivalent work environment, how to make individual psychological profiles and to better understand people. I also have understanding now of the needs of the organization and how to make cost-benefit analyses on how to invest in new programmes, volunteers, trainings, projects, etc.

Furthermore, in the Training course I had the opportunity not only to express my cultural identity and to present to the others my country, my religion and the various traditional characteristics of the Bulgarian nation, but also to learn more about other nations and their peculiarities. Personally for me this was the best part of the course, and the most valuable asset I got from participating in it. The opportunity to understand in depth the worldview, values and needs of the other, and to work with him/her irrespective of her-his nationality and religion gives more to the personal development than any kind of academic programme or formal knowledge. This experience improves the tolerance, humanity, and open-mindedness of people and I appreciate it highly.

I think this course provided me with some important insights into how to develop my interests and research on the topic of humanity and intercultural communication. Now I am really more motivated to develop youth initiatives and I feel myself better prepared to do this, since I have more competences and knowledge on how to theoretically and practically develop a youth project on various topics and how to motivate larger part of the youth population to participate in such projects and initiatives. I am really enthusiastic now to start organizing my next project, developed together with people I met at this training course.

I consider the Training Course on Resource Management extremely useful. It gave me as I already mentioned unique skills and knowledge into how to be more active and motivated in developing youth projects, how to manage and organize such projects, how to work with volunteers from different countries and with diverse backgrounds and religions. The course also gave me the opportunity to realize the importance of youth work in the context of European development and make me more aware of the crucial importance of youth initiatives for development of active civil society.