We have many applications coming from all over Europe and we are very happy with the interest in InTouch. At the moment we are still looking for participants especially from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Poland. Dont hesitate and apply! Unfortunatly we cant accept any applications from Bulgaria, Romania and Czech Republic anymore.
Watch the InTouch movie on YouTube!
- Do you want to learn more about international youth exchanges?
- Are you interested how to bring them to success and use them for development of your own group?
- Do you want to find potential partners for your project?
- Do you want to use the IYNF support framework for youth exchanges?
Then join InTouch 2009 - a training on youth exchanges organised by IYNF within its networking programme
This is what previous participants said about the seminar InTouch:
I learned good training techniques and had wonderful discussions with people with different backgrounds, history and nationality...It was definitely a mind broadening experience.
Agnieszka Krzyzak, Poland
It was one of my first steps towards open doors of Europe and it made my next steps much easier. Now I am an EVS volunteer in Ireland. Iva Joudalova, Czech Republic
It was really useful and when I left I was full with motivation and ideas.Florin Potra, Romania
I never felt that much satisfied after a seminar! Sven Sucker, Germany
Youth exchanges and InTouch
Youth exchanges are an excellent method of youth work. They have a potential of giving young people and children an enormous learning experience. Confrontation with own culture, discovering unfamiliar places and countries, taking responsibility over the programme, generous material a programme conditions - these all are unique opportunities of youth exchanges.
From our experience, we see that organising even a single youth exchange gives a great input for growth and development of the organising group. As youth exchanges often create a transformation experience from participants to volunteers, local groups get more young people involved in their work and programme, the type of activities changes too.
Youth exchanges, as we often see, are a starting point of a further learning path. Many exchange participants start to seek other opportunities - are more motivated for language education, want to get further training in youth work, want to go for EVS, want to organise new projects in their local group etc.
However, unlike a holiday trip or summercamp, youth exchanges are fairly more difficult to organise. Starting from the need to find good partner(s), over the lot of work with fundraising and financial admninistration up to the specific concept of youth exchanges where young people are expected to participate on the preparation of the programme, the presence of intercultural learning and specific methods used for that purpose.
IYNF is aware of these difficulties and has prepared a support scheme - networking programmes - for youth exchanges organised for two age groups: 13-17 (teen camps) and 18-25 (youth exchanges). In this scheme IYNF will help interested local groups with organising the project for the specific target group and guide them through the project cycle needed for succesful implementation. One big step in this scheme is InTouch.
Project description
InTouch is a short, practical and experiential workshop about the basics of organizing and managing international youth camps and youth exchanges, according to the framework of Youth in Action programme of the European Union. The Youth in Action program enables young Europeans to organise projects on an international level in order to meet each other, learn about other cultures and share knowledge and experience.
What does it mean practically?
The topics of the workshop will be:
- What is exactly a youth exchange? – why it is more than just a youth camp or trip?
- The life cycle of a youth exchange - from the first idea until the celebration of the success
- Grant application writing: what is Youth in Action programme and what are the most important things you have to take care of if you want to write a successful application
- Intercultural cooperation: what are the most common challenges of working together with people from other cultures, other countries, and what are the constructive way of handling those challenges
- How to design a programme-agenda of an activity, how to create a good programme- flow
- How to deal with a group, some basics and useful tips about group-dynamics
- During the seminar you can also meet and make friends with people from other countries, get new contacts, meet possible partners for future cooperation, and experience a nice intercultural activity.
- Introduction about IYNF as an organisation and our new networkingprograms
- And many more interesting things, according to the needs, questions and experiences of the participants of the seminar.
We will use the methods of non-formal and experiential education, so there will be place to learn, to share, to play and to have fun!
Team
This is the third edition of InTouch - a project that IYNF has been developing and improving since 2006. Each team of trainers has brought a bit of their wisdom and experience and the projects concept is very well developed. This year, the team of InTouch trainers is composed from the following IYNF volunteers and staff:
Friedrich Koeckert, DE
Friedrich is active in IYNF for five years already and is currently active
as the president of IYNF. He has been involved in the Meet the Freak youth
exchange for several years and recently got interested with working on
self-organisation, intercultural learning, communication and conflicts and
experiential learning in trainings and seminars. He will co-ordinate this
years edition of InTouch.
Anna Foldhazi, HU
Starting as a participant of Meet the Freak, Biba found her way to IYNF in 2006, however as an skilled youth worker already, with a good deal of experience from Hungary. Later on, joining IYNF long-term training course for amateur art facilitators, and participating on other international seminars and trainings, she got a good deal of training skills. Biba was one of the trainers of InTouch 2008, now she is a member of IYNF Presidium.
Ondrej Pohanka, CZ
Ondrej is IYNF Secretary General and holds about 14 years of active youth work experience, from which almost ten on the international level. With passion for experiential education and learning, he tries to put this methodology also into seminars and workshops. He has been a trainer in both previous editions of InTouch in 2006 and 2008.
Lucie Frisova, CZ
Lucie is originally coming from Duha CZ, Czech member orgnaisation of IYNF where she use to be a youth leader. Later she joined the Secretariat of IYNF, starting as assistant, and then in position of Members Affairs Officer. She has been editor of Variety magazine for several years and is currently editor of the yearbook.
Except for IYNF she is working as a trainer of Czech National Agency of Youth in Action programme and as free-lance trainer in human rights education, leadership courses and outdoor and experiential courses for different target groups. She has been participating in IYNF activities both as participant and as organiser since 2003.
Besides the team Anna and Vanessa -who both are EVS volunteers in IYNF- will be at InTouch as supporting staff. They will take care about the name games, getting to know each other and the energizers. Besides that it is a good opportunity for them to see how a seminar like InTouch is done by the team.
Target group
Who can participate?
Everyone, who is:
- Interested in the practical way of organising international youth exchanges and camps
- Looking forward to meet new people from all over Europe and find potential partners
- Who is motivated to get involved in the international youth work
- Between 18 and 30 years old, with exceptions possible on both sides
- And can understand and speak English
The team will select the participants based on the criteria mentioned above also taking into consideration geographical, gender and experiential balance among participants. Priority will be given to participants coming from IYNF member and partner organisations and/or running activities for IYNF member organisations on national, regional or local level.
As the project is supported by the Youth in Action programme, we can only accept EU residents. At the moment, we have partnership agreements from Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Poland. Participants from other EU countries are possible too, but we will have to arrange a partnership agreement with a sending organisation. If you have doubts about being an potential participant, please contact us and we will clarify that with you.
Application and selection process
To register, please use our on-line registration form, which is the only way to enlist into the project.
There are several deadlines for applications; depending on the deadline you can either get a discount or a surcharge for the participation fees:
- Early birds registering until 1 September will get a discount of 10 EUR!
- Standard deadline is 23 September, you get no surcharge but also no discount.
- Late birds registering after 23 September risk there will be no space in the activity any more and will have to pay a surcharge of 10 EUR to their normal participation fee.
The registration form, besides your personal data, includes also questions to your motivation and experience. Please reply the questions fully; your answers will be the basis for IYNF to select the participants for the activity.
After you register, you will get immediately an automatically generated confirmation of your application. This only means that your application was successfully processed by the system. Applications are gathered to the two deadlines (early bird and standard deadline) and participants are selected in these two rounds:
- For early birds until 3 September,
- For dead-liners until 28 September.
The applications of late birds will be assessed as it goes.
In some cases, we may also put applicants on a waiting list. In case you applied as an early bird and were selected on the later stage, the discounts of 10 EUR will be still valid for you as if you were selected in the first round.
All participants will be informed about the decision (accepted/rejected/waiting list) as soon as they are made by email to the address you provide in the application form (please make sure it is a correct one). Accepted applicants will receive an admission sheet with instructions for further action. In case you didnt receive any email from us in the expected time, please contact us by email or phone.
