“Track One” is a TWO-year long project involving partner organisations in the consortium from Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Latvia. The project aims to increase the quality, and thereby outreach of youth work by encouraging innovative & collaborative practices between organisations active in the field of youth, using outdoor adventure education as the main working methodology. In other terms, the project brings together organizations active in the field of youth and creates opportunities to share experiences & different approaches in working with young people, specifically focusing on using Outdoor Adventure Education as a methodology.
During all its stages “Track One” sets the following SMARTobjectives:
- To explore and promote Outdoor Adventure Education (OAE) as an effective and inclusive tool in youth work;
- To create space for sharing knowledge, exchanging experiences and good practices among youth workers and partner organizations, particularly using OAE in Youth work;
- To Increase knowledge of the theoretical and pedagogical background of Outdoor Adventure Education methods;
- To build up common knowledge and create a public resource platform in the area of OAE and experiential learning to be accessible for the partner organizations as well as for any other external stakeholders;
- To build solid international partnership in the education and youth fields using OAE and Experiential learning methods;
- To discover the opportunities of cooperation and promotion of OAE under local and international programs and foundation;
- To create a concrete tangible outcome, a publication tracking the learning methodology used during the whole project and its learning impact on the individuals, directly and indirectly, involved in the project.
Track One consists of three stages, each of them involving a series of smaller activities.
STAGE 1: Training and capacity building (October 2021 – June 2022)
On this stage we aim to empower participants representing partner organizations by training them, showing the best practices existing in the partner consortium and preparing them to transfer the learning into their local realities. This stage consists of an introductory Training Course in Georgia hosted by Youth Association Droni, Job Shadowing in Warsaw, Poland, hosted by Polish organization Manufacture of Science and Adventure, and 2 Study Visits, the first in Lupeni, Romania, hosted by New Horizons Foundation, and the second one in Latvia, hosted by Piedzivojuma Gars.
STAGE 2: Local Empowerment Stage2 (March 2022 – August 2022)
This stage targets to create the series of local activities designed and run by the participants of stage 1, with the support of partner organizations. In a short-term understanding, within the project context, it serves the purpose of putting the learning into practice and creating good examples of using outdoor adventure education in grassroots youth work. In long term, we envision it to promote OAE as an educational methodology in general and support the partner organizations to establish/upgrade educational modules using nature and OAE principles in their youth work.
Apart from the series of local workshops, stage 2 also includes a youth exchange in Ukraine, hosted by NGO Logos, bringing together young people recruited during the local activities, allowing them to be part of an educational, international outdoor youth project.
STAGE 3: Dissemination & Follow Up (September-October 2022)
The main objective of this stage is to disseminate the outcomes of the previous stages, raise the visibility of the project (among relevant partner organizations, public institutions, interested individuals & the wide public…) and in general, promote the OAE as an educational method. Stage 3 will take place in Georgia and will consist of a Large Scale Event, which presumably will have a character of an outdoor festival, and a Seminar, which will help to digest and evaluate the whole project and come up with the future steps for enhancing partnership among the organizations.
