Last April I had the opportunity to represent Synergia Youth Association at the Seminar “Start-Up Seminar for Youth Mobility” focusing on the preparation and work of FOCUS Group, a group created to support mobility, where for 5 days experts focus on knowledge sharing.

The referred mobility is a long term cooperation between EU and ASIAN NGOs under Erasmus + Program KA2 “Forward Looking cooperation in Youth Work: a dream getting through” – 4EU&US.
This project is involved in a series of projects where the main focus is to pass knowledge on the success of the Erasmus Plus Program into the Asian NGOs involved in the process to create an try and create and agreement between this entities. One of the result of this will be white papers with recommendations in order to influence the policy makers to make the best out of youth policies for this matter, work developed by the FOCUS GROUP.

This mobility had focus in share experience on youth mobility programmes, on managing youth policies on cooperation between policy makers and NGOs sector.

The mentioned seminar allowed the creation of face-to-face relationships and also the idealization of the sustained steps of evolution in the cooperative work, prior to the beginning of the work in the co-working space.

During the seminar, after the personal and organizational presentations, the presentation began with exercises in non-formal education methodologies, such as defining culture in person and exchanging impressions for the perception of the points of contact between the team of partners.

We also presented by country how the youth structure and policies worked in each of the partner countries of the project, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Indonesia and the Philippines. In this way a number of differences were discernible, such as funding issues, with EU NGOs being substantially more supported through public funds and those of ASIA being primarily supported by private funds.

During these days we also had the opportunity to attend an international conference hosted by the host organization in Semarang where we exchanged mobility experiences with about 100 young Indonesians, and later in small groups we had the opportunity to speak in more detail and answer questions about the personal experiences of mobility.

We also had the opportunity to understand all the stakeholders of the projects and what tasks were expected for each one, where guidelines were established on procedures during the project, that is, during the project development months.

On a personal level the opportunity to meet people from different continents with different perspectives has enriched me a lot and I can say that the cultural dimension in this project is of immeasurable value to all participants.

The fact of being able to know different cultures through the gastronomy and the cultural visit to the city of Semerang is a wealth that will last in my memory and life. I personally highlight the gastronomic issue, something I definitely recommend to try, where the richness of flavors is fantastic.

On the level of leisure and personal relationships we had the opportunity to go to a different karaoke than we experienced in Europe in Semerang, Indonesia. The karaoke functions as a religion where in a space we have about 20 different rooms equipped to sing karaoke where a group of friends sings to themselves, very different from what we see in Europe.

Recommended experience 😉

Experience & Writing: Miguel Barros