“From experts to sexperts!”

International Training Course
“From experts to sexperts!”

 

Personal impressions from our participants:

Yanko Velkov:
““Let’s go back to the real life!” – told me with smile a boy from my national group at the end of the project. I looked at his eyes, pausing there for a few seconds: “This… is the real life.”. Am I wrong?

The headline of this upcoming training course evoke a smile on my face. But at the next moment I was already reading the description with increasing interest – it looked like something really useful, something which I needed both for my professional and personal development.

The reality though, surpassed all my expectations. We ended up in a solitary holiday house on the shore of the second biggest lake in Estonia. Then the standard introductions – about how was the trip to here and who we are – started. And then suddenly it was already the last day of the project, and we were pulling sadly our luggage toward the bus station to home…

I wasn’t able to feel the time mainly due to the excellent program – the serious training sessions and complicated discussions always ended with innovatively planned and relaxing nights (out of which special attention deserve the sauna nights and the Olympic games;); almost every day we had a different guest-lector – skillful youth workers, who were eager to share their work experience, and ideas how we could deal with similar situations.

If we add the delicious national cuisine, the good beer and the day-trip to Tallinn, the result will be one of my best Erasmus+ projects…!” 

Zlatomira Kulcheva and Jelena Ostoich:
“”From experts to sexperts” was a 7-day training, that happened between 11th and 19th of September, 2016. Its aim was to prepare youth workers to lead classes and workshops in sexual education for youth. Not only a challenging topic, but also a challenging age group to work with. Yet the medical students from Estonia, who were the main trainers and organisers, did a great job in providing us with both relevant information and useful tips and tricks for how to turn the “dry facts” into an interactive and engaging activity. We were introduced to a wide range of subtopics of the main team – starting from anatomy, contraception, STDs and abortion to topics such as Violence and Victim support, gender roles and stereotypes and the effects of porn, even reaching topics rarely tackled in sexual education – relationships, body-image, consent, LGBTQ, youth with special needs.
The training programme was structure in such a way that it was giving us knowledge not only in the content of the Sexual education topics, but also how to deal with practical issues that might arise in a class: how to create and keep a safe environment where people`s opinions and boundaries are respected, how to deal with provocations and strong-opinionated youth and also how to use humor and yet be serious and not make fun of anyone or any topic.
After all the workshops, where we could experience the presented methods ourselves as participants, we had a space to create our own methods on certain topics related to sexual education and carry them out with the others. This was a valuable opportunity for us to use our knowledge and creativity to see what we have learned and see from a first-had experience how it feels to be a youth worker. After each session we had a round of feedbacks so that we can improve and do it better next time.
What was really enriching and meaningful in this training was that we had the great opportunity to learn from the knowledge and the experience of different processionals, who were invited to lead the variety of the workshops. We could ask anything that was interesting or not clear enough.
In the middle of the training we had a day trip to Tallinn where we had a mixed of activities: city tour with some curious stories about the Estonian capital, some free time and we also visited one of the most developed youth centers in Tallinn. It provides not only useful information to the youth, but also space for meaningful interactions and engaging in free-time activities, it encourages the development of talents and entrepreneurship spirit in the youth. We also learned more on how the NGO sector works in cooperation with the local governmental structures.
The evenings of our programme were full of various fun activities with some educational elements. Apart from the usual international evenings, we had this amazing Sexual Olympic games, which was full of funny yet challenging games where we needed to work together as a team and look for creative solutions in order to complete all the tasks.
The training provided us with a lot of interesting and thought-provoking inputs and hand-on experience on the wide range of sexual education and how to engage the youth in a meaningful way. It was a really informative and useful start, the rest is practice.”

 

Project Summary:

Sexuality is a substantial and important part of every humans life. It will present itself starting with birth and will play a part in a persons life until ones death.
However, not everyone has the possibility to learn about sexual health. This may be caused by the general stigma put on everything related to sex. In some countries there is a lack of means or motivation to have sexual education in schools. There is also spread of false-information on the subject of sexual health, which is spread by different biased groups.
Lack of valid knowledge about sexual health promotes risky behavior, stigmatization, violence for example through bullying in schools, and discrimination. All the aforementioned factors affect mostly, but not only, the youth. This results in rising prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, deterioration of mental health and lower quality of life in general.
This project dealed with and prevented the problems caused by the lack of valid sexual education provided to youth. This was done through training youth workers to empower young people and provide them scientifically valid information on the subject of sexual health.
Estonian Medical Students Association is an organisation, which has a goal to promote sexual education with years of experience in teaching Estonian children all over the country. Teaching of sexual education by EstMSA is done using a wide variety of non-formal learning methods. They have people who have continuously trained  peer-to-peer educators on national and international scale. They have people who have made it possible to receive sexual education for thousands of schoolchildren from advantaged and disadvantaged population groups alike. These people are on the par with recent scientific research and are eager to exchange their knowledge and experience with other youth workers.
We saw that by making it possible for different youth workers from all over Europe to meet, share their knowledge and experience on subjects, they are all passionate about, will encourage to work out new methods of non-formal education, establish long-lasting partnerships and will not only benefit youth workers themselves but everyone, especially the young people internationally.

Organizations involved:

  • „The Change is in You” Association – Bulgaria;
  • EstMSA – Estonia;
  • Youth Europa – Estonia;
  • SYTEV – Slovakia;
  • Asociatia GEYC – Romania;
  • HACETTEPE UNIVERSITESI – Turkey.

 

Accommodation:

Situated in Vaibla, 40 km from Tartu, Veldemani puhkemaja boasts a hot tub and a private beach area. Otepää is 47 km from the property. Free WiFi is provided and free private parking is available on site. Towels and bed linen are available. Veldemani puhkemaja also includes a sauna. You can play billiards at the property, and the area is popular for skiing and fishing. Viljandi is 27 km from Veldemani puhkemaja.

Pictures of the place: http://www.veldemani.ee/index.php/tegevused

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybcZOSVnjY

 

YouthPass:

Every participant was individually entitled to receive a Youthpass Certificate, which confirms participation and validates the non-formal learning (NFL) experience of Training course project. Validating the learning experiences of participants is important in itself and the document can be of benefit in terms of the educational or employment future of the participant. Through Youthpass the European Commission ensures the Training course activity is recognized as a non-formal learning experience.
(*For more information on Youthpass you may click on this page to check it online)