<< Background >>The aim of ProfessionalED project is to ensure long-term development of quality of youth work. We claim that to reach high quality, development has to happen throughout a widely accessible, standardized learning process that can be transferred among different generations, among young people with different level of experience. ProfessionalED aims to create and provide this. We believe in a holistic approach of individual development and in that professional improvement cannot happen without personal development. Therefore, the curricula we aim to create follows this principle and the frame of integral learning. By integral we mean the synergy of formal, non formal, informal education. To maximize young people’s learning experience each type includes elements of the others. Innovative pedagogical elements and up-to-date non formal tools will be combined in the methods and tested during the project. Being a youth trainer and/or youth worker are professionals on their own. If not before, during the pandemic year all people active on the field could experience that in case they cannot practice their profession and therefore they need to change career path, they have challenges to prove their qualities and competences. One of the reasons for this is that the recognition of these professions are different even within Europe and it is also very minimal (see details in need assessment attached). Youthpass and ETS competences are great basis, however do not necessarily fall into other stakeholders’ standards. Youthpass mainly because it is missing the facilitated assessment part (it is mainly a self-evaluation-based tool), ETS competences are very particular yet very wide and can be modified according to personal needs. This evaluation system will clearly have a self-assessment part and facilitated assessment to mentor individuals into finding their best potential on the field. Having this system will result the next objective. When there is a clearly described evaluation process that gives a modular system and is transparent enough for all parties, certifications can be created and used to market and promote the programs that youth trainers and youth workers work on. It is attractive to people to follow learning paths that have clear reference points and tangible outcomes.Youthpass could be a great start, with the addition of the personal development aspect, that our methods will provide and emphasize; and the external professionally facilitated assessment part. Through the tested training and mentoring processes, there will be 75 mobilities involved in learning activities and min. 55 people equipped with the methods, knowledge of the processes, and evaluation to continue the work, serve communities, and transfer the whole package to other people and organisations.To summarize: training cycle with follow-up mentoring will be designed and tested, throughout the whole learning cycle precise and newly created evaluation system will be used; by the end of the cycle based on the evaluation system a certification will be worked out and as a result of the training and mentoring a community of practice will rise up.<< Objectives >>Objectives of the projects and its connections with the priorities: O1: Providing clear individual development paths for young people on the field of youth work – by having clear steps and mentored processes to develop personally and professionally on the field of youth in an organization, young people get equipped with sets of competences and experience. It gives references to continue their career in different paths: youth work, training or even in other fields. Other fields, because we are focusing on the two main career path in the field of youth: youth workers who do the field work on the daily basis with young people in all kinds of formats, youth trainers who deliver educational activities to other young people, experts or organisations related to youth. We also recognize while going through this process some candidate youth workers or trainers might deviate and realize their true call or profession connected to the youth field. We are ready to involve them as well and nurture their personal and professional development. That strengthens employability.O2: Creation of integral educational curricula for NGO staff members that enables smooth knowledge transfer and change of generations within the organizations – there is a strong need within NGOs to assure the inclusion and diversity in all fields of education, training and youth. In order to support that it is crucial to engage and empower young people. Often the staff of NGOs have limited capacity to focus on the individual needs and make sure that they can include everyone regardless the fewer opportunities or challenges young people might face with. The transferable integral (formal, non-formal and informal) educational package that will be worked out throughout this project, could support that processes of inclusion and enabling of young generations in a wider perspective. O3: To have a clear evaluation system to support individual developmentO4: To ensure stronger recognition of youth work among other stakeholdersO3 and O4 are connected and both support to realize the priority of increasing quality and recognition of youth work. By having a clear evaluation system that combines self-evaluation and a facilitated assessment process will lead to a certification system that goes beyond Youthpass. This certificate will be supported with the combined assessment system as well as with data that will be delivered throughout this project. This creates a great opportunity to strengthen the recognition of youth work as it will give a base for a certification system, too. O5: To establish a growing community of professionals to sustain the use of outcomes of the project (community of practice) – this objective will assure the sustainability and the high quality follow up of the project way after it is over since the professional trained people will be equipped with a wide range of up-to-date set of knowledge and skills that can be used in a flexible way based on their and their target groups’ needs. This is strengthening the employability of young people as well as the quality of the work they do in the field of youth work and training.<< Implementation >>Co-creation process of the evaluation tool starts with the collection of all the existing tools: Youthpass, ETS competences, tools of the organizations. Based on that, together with the mentor from Skills Builder essential competences will be collected with indicators and benchmarks. Following this we define the exact parts of the assessment: self-assessment tool and assisted assessment that will include qualitative (interviews and observations) and quantitative (Likert-scale, counting of events and results) methods. Once we have the full set of indicators and methods we start to use it with the first participants. The evaluation tool will serve as a relevant and crucial part of the learning process of the project and as a base for the certification and the recognition of the process. Learning activities are designed in a way that they serve competence development of learners. The planned programs are a combination of methods, tools and trials of training for youth professionals from the partners’ experience and knowledge on the field of integral education. The exact nature of the 3rd activity will be designed based on the evaluation and learners’ needs after the first two activities. In each training iteration there is on-spot mentoring during local activities that learners implement. The evaluation process will be used throughout the whole unit (training+field visit). These activities provide the learning element for the participants and also the content of the curricula. Based on the experience of the trainers, the participants and the evaluation of all parties involved, the curricula will be created. There will be written material to give guidelines for those who want to use our method. The curriculum is built up in a way that people can go through all the 3 modules to get the whole cycle of learning and in this way be able to adjust the methods and processes based on their own needs. Learning activities give the opportunity to start the community of practice. Some learners will meet on all three activities and the rest will also share valuable moments together to build the foundation of the community. Between these, there will be online community building actions for them regularly, and the combination of the two types will strengthen the bond among the members. As LTTAs will be followed with a field visit and on-spot mentoring, this gives a unique opportunity to assure that learning activities are individualized. It will provide practical tools for youth workers (both the learners and the colleagues of the partner organizations) for proper need-based coaching and mentoring. The field visit will take place in the country of the learner, conducted by one local youth worker and a professional from one of the partner organizations. The activity that will be visited and all the details of the visit will be agreed upon in advance. This part of the activities is critical for both the assessment and the curricula. The community of practice takes advantage of the innovative edge of online community of practice - to connect adult educators to the professionals of the field, to support long-term engagement and provide an added value of learning - by sharing personal experiences and stories. This will help transfer the ownership of the project results to the members of CoP, so they would become multipliers, disseminating it further and become ProfessionalED ambassadors. The community around the project will add value to each of the results by their comments, insights, evaluations to add another layer of applicability to the content designed over the time of the project. This will also provide feedback and feed-forward to other project results.In order to get holistic curricula of the ProfessionalED project with all the assessment and professional content for youth professionals, these activities are essential and they all lead to the professionalization of youth work, increasing its recognition.<< Results >>The base of ProfessionalED is a training curriculum that will be tested through the learning activities. Throughout these, learners will acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes on training programs that have the basic construction and will be tailor-made throughout the testing based on the learners’ need. (See in detail: Learning, Training and Teaching Activities description.)Besides the development of their staff members and/or volunteers, the organizations will learn how to work in such a project team, mastering the use of different project management tools, coordination of international projects and enhance their communication and cooperation competences. Involved in a long-term transnational cooperation, organisations build their own capacities. PR1 – Curricula with training program (design and development): a full holistic training cycle will be developed and tested with the element of individualized mentoring and follow up. The involved learners that sign up for the whole cycle will participate in 3 different training courses that focus on (a) professional basics, (b) personal development and (c) individual special mastering. The first two training courses have the same curricula for all involved participants to acquire the common elements of (a) and (b). The third program will be modified according to the needs of the participants and will be designed in a two-track way: one track for the youth trainers and another for the outreach youth workers. After each training the core team of learners (the ones who sign up for the full cycle) will receive on the job mentoring by an expert of their own organisation and another from another partner organisation. All these will be constantly monitored with the evaluation tools (PR2) so that to know if there is any adjustment needed to finalize the curricula in the end. PR2 – Evaluation method and tool with certification – before the whole training cycle there will be a specific evaluation method worked out, combining European instruments (Youthpass, ETS, organizations’ evaluation) and Skills Builder development tools. The method will be described thoroughly and used throughout the whole learning cycle of the curricula. Since it has a crucial personal reflection part and because the whole evaluation focuses on the learners’ development, it is important that all the details of it are understood. Therefore – especially for future use – that tool will be translated for all the languages of the partners. It will be possible to use the tool universally, making it a great base for a certification that can be spread later on and assessed and validated by other stakeholders in the future. (O3, O4)PR3 – Research study/report for reference to disseminate and promote – By conducting the test and the assessment throughout the project, we will have significant data to prove the efficiency and the impact of the methods. This supports the certification system and gives the opportunity to show stakeholders – universities, other NGOs, public institutions – the professionalism and strengths of youth work and youth training. With the cooperation of the associate partner, this research will provide the base for later validation of the certification. PR4 – Community of practice – the core team of learners will be the first group of people trained with the curricula, assessed with the new tool and receive the certification of ProfessionalED. Throughout the project there will be activities dedicated to strengthen their cohesion as a group with community building approach and tools (online activities, skillsharing and workshops among each other organized in the beginning and supported to self-organize later on). In this way there will be a community of professionals who will organize their youth work activities with the knowledge they acquired and will be able to train and evaluate other people who want to receive and use the training of ProfessionalED.

"The project “Frame[v]work” aims at improving the quality of volunteers exchange within the IVS movement, in order to reinforce the concepts of international voluntarism, active participation and international solidarity. The name refer to the concepts of framework, network and voluntarism: “Frame[v]work"" intends to be a capacity-building project to develop a functional, shared framework for international voluntary work and volunteers exchange in the IVS movement. The partners of the projects are networks and organisations who implement long-term and short-term voluntary projects involving local activists, international volunteers and local communities. The members of the partenrship share the same needs:-the need to find solutions to stop the drop of volunteers in workcamps;-the need to harmonize the exchange procedures for short-term and long-term volunteers developed by the different networks of the IVS movement;-the need propose clear and unify promotional strategy for international voluntarism, in order to reinforce the involvement and active participation of young people, including those with fewer opportunities;-the demand to map all the existing best practices on volunteer exchange and to share them within the networks, in order to increase the quality standards of projects and the campacity on the assessment of their impact. IIn order to improve the quality of the international voluntary activities of the IVS movement, it is vital to involve as many networks as possible in the process. For this reason, the partnership include large networks (CCIVS, Alliance, NVDA, SCI) and several organisations coming from different regions and continents. The final outcome of the project will be the creation of new guidelines for voluntary exchange, more updated and comprehensive that the ones already existing.The project foresees 4 phases:- A preparation phase, with the creation of the Steering Team and the kick-off meeting, where representatives from the networks and organisations will analyse the current exchange procedures and prepare the ground for the following regional laboratories;- The 4 regional laboratories, where organisations will analyse all the aspects of their region related to volunteer exchange, quality standards of projects, promotion and communication;- An evaluation and production phase, where the outputs from each laboratory will be evaluated and consolidated into a final production (exchange guidelines with a contribution from all networks);- A dissemination phase, including a training course to share the new guidelines with IVS organisation and to illustrate the way they can be applied to voluntary projects, in order to improve their quality and impact."