Finallyyy we are posting about our follow up activity of our amazing experience in Vidrike. As you know, Virginie and I, form the Belgian team of the group and therefore we held our workshop together in our home town Liege.
First of of all I must say that we were lucky to find support from the head of Epto belgium, our friends and our organization: Instants Productions, in order to logistically organize our event. We decided to do it on a Saturday afternoon as most people are busying during the week.
We mainly promoted our event via facebook and using our own friend's network an through this technique we managed to gather around 15 people. It was nice we had a mixed group with man and woman with different roots as you know belgium is a country of immigration so it was nice to have this cultural diversity in our workshop :-)!!
Concerning the agenda of our workshop we respected the themes that we saw in Vidrike. In fact we started our session with an introduction round where we talked a bit about youth in action and we explained why we were doing this workshop and what with did in our training in Estonia. I think that was very important as a lot of participant were wondering why were we organizing such an event. We then did a classic introduction round with a little icebreaker so that the participant could know each other beter and feel more confortable about SHARING about them and their experiences.
After the introduction round, we played the greeting game. This was a great activity as the participants started to understand that they are in an active workshop and that they wont just sit and listen for the whole day.
Afterwards we ran the molecule activity which was really good. Virginie played the game of going out of the room and the participants wrote their first impression about her before she told who she really is via her molecule. We of course formed groups to let the participants share who they are and then we played the standup game before debriefing the activity all together.
We then moved on with the quadrant activity, that was really a cool activity as well as we got a great conversation out of it and we started discussing real life situation related to discrimination and prejudices that happen in Belgium. Finally we closed the session with the rolling paper game, and there it was interesting to see that everyone had stereotypes and that is something inherent to the human kind that we cant remove but at least we could try to reduce and try to go beyond our first impression.
We had really good feedback about our workshop. The participants said that they were all happy they had come even if it was a kind of sunny Saturday :). They were positively surprises about the methods we used to lead the conversations and they loved the non formal learning aspect of our session. Actually most of them admitted that they expected to be bored and that they won't learn much but at the end they were all very happy about the small group discussion they had and that they were very happy about sharing their experiences but most of all happy about hearing other's experiences. We all concluded that, a few hours to deal with such a topic is not enough and that our session only explored the subject in surface. They all would have enjoyed to have joined us in Vidrike for a longer training :)!!
Finally us as trainers, we felt very confortable and we were really happy about the outcome of our session. All the participants came with a good spirit and they all participated quite well, we never expected blanks in our conversations we even had at sometimes to stopp the conversations due to time management. There is no need to say that we got good grades as trainers :P so that was very positive for us. It was a great experience and we are thinking about organizing other similar events.
Jalal & Virginie
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