From 29th of May to 4th of June 2022, three members of CET platforma have participated on the Partnership Building Activity “AcThink – Act Responsible, Think Sustainable!” in Fuscaldo, Italy, that was organized by our partners PAOLAB.
The project’s main aim was to learn to think and behave more sustainably and create future partnerships that will allow us to branch out our projects. The projects participating countries were Italy, Macedonia, Greece, Latvia, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Poland, Spain and Sweden.
The project activities were directed towards making better connections between the participants in order for them to exchange their previously attained knowledge, tools and good practices that will help them to collaborate in the future more successfully. The project helped participants to raise their quality of youth work with environmental issues in their communities as well as internationally, by using the methods of non-formal education.
The fun and the learning part of the project started from day one, where we had interesting games in order to get to know each other. My favorite one was when we had a few minutes to speak with our partner, but only in our native language. Meaning our partner had to guess what we were saying and vice versa. All the participants enjoyed the games. We then learned about the Youthpass competencies of lifelong learning and how can we apply them throughout the project.
Every day we had new challenges, where we as groups could tackle and further develop our understanding of the project and its aims. Sometimes the groups were picked at random but other times we represented our sending country. For example, we had to a task where we learned about our country and how they deal with their carbon emissions, pollution and what is the overshoot day for each country. Then it was our task to reflect and compare each country bad and good practices in this fight against climate change.
It was also fun when we were given the chance to come up with a project that is correlated to this agenda and how can we continue to connect with our fellow participants in order to spread the knowledge we gained on this PBA.
And now for the other side of the project, not only was it fun to educate ourselves through task and games, we also had the opportunity to get to know each other as well as get to know other cultures through intercultural nights. For me, this helped in making us closer therefore making us work even better when it came to brainstorming projects and ideas. It was also nice to get to know new people, experience their way of life and understand their cultures more. Also, the food and the fun on those nights was great!
Overall, it was nice to see a great group of people that are willing to educate themselves more and that are willing to spread the knowledge that we acquired on this project. It was a very pleasant work environment that was created by our trainers Bojan Kocevski and Andrea Bernieri, because they really brought a great energy to the project.
I learned so much from this project and I would love to be able to speak more about the subject of sustainability, as well as the impact that small amounts of work can have on the overall situation regarding climate change.
It was a great time, enjoyed with great people.
– Summary written by Ekaterina Kuzmanoska
