Call for project team

EFIL is recruiting 2 members for the project team of ACTIVE: Active Citizenship Tools In Various Environments, a project aimed at developing educational material on active citizenship for programme participants and volunteers. The project will run from January to September 2015 and it will require continuous work with long-distance communication tools. Moreover it will include 2 in-person meetings (January and May-June) and piloting of the educational tools at exchange participant’s orientations and volunteer trainings in different European countries in April/May.

The project idea

EFIL has been running the European Citizenship Trimester Programme (ECTP) for six years and is committed to improve its quality. EFIL is in charge of overseeing the educational content of the whole programme but is directly responsible only of one of its phases, namely the Brussels Camp. Within ECTP, before departure participants should reflect on their cultural identity, the civil society in their country and their role as citizens. In the host country they explore the civil society and cultural aspects linked to citizenship and then upon return they are encouraged to take action and engage in local projects in their communities.

However, volunteers in AFS organisation have a hard time in connecting Intercultural learning with Citizenship education by guiding participants in the reflection from “me & my civil society” to a discovery of civil society in other countries/other models of citizenship and finally the creation of social change in the local community and globally by linking up with people from all over Europe and beyond for global changemaking.

There is a need for educational materials on active citizenship that are widely accessible by volunteers, attractive and easy to use in orientations for participants.

At the same time AFS International started a partnership with Ashoka youth venture, an organisation expert in social change, to include elements of active citizenship and social entrepreneurship, also called ‘changemaking’ into AFS programmes and volunteer trainings, with the objective of having participants and volunteers start up projects to impact their local communities. Here you can see a video of this cooperation:

Therefore EFIL aims at combining its efforts to improve active citizenship content of exchanges, to the efforts of AFS International, with the objective of providing educational tools that would boost the presence of active citizenship content throughout the wide range of trainings, events and programme orientations - not only in ECTP but also semester and year exchange programmes.

The educational tools can be anything: online courses, videos, playing cards, posters to trigger reflection through images, quotes, questions. They key element is that they need to be flexible and easy-to-use - by volunteers in activities for exchange participants, by trainers in a volunteer training, by exchange participants themselves, by volunteers organising a public event. ACTIVE Tools should allow targeting different audiences (age, number), in different environments (from online to open air events), at different levels of depth in reflection.

The preparatory team will create the educational material (physical and online), pilot their use with participants and volunteers, edit the materials on the basis of the piloting, introduce the materials to the EFIL network at the Volunteer Summit Summit on ‘Citizenship Education’, link up with the Preparatory team of the Training for Trainers in October to see how the tools can be used in a local school and at the volunteer training, link up with the Intercultural Dialogue Day (IDD) project to encourage the use of the materials in the IDD public events organised at local level in September all over Europe.

The project is supported with a 10 000 € grant from the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe.

Projects steps

December: creation of the project team, online preparation (first skype call)

January: project team in-person meeting in Brussels to brainstorm and decide the educational tools to create, based on the network’s needs

February: creation of the educational tools

March: finalisation of the educational tools

April-May: piloting of the tools in the countries of the project team members and in Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Russia by EFIL within another parallel project to improve ECTP orientations.

End of May/June: in person meeting to edit the tools on the basis of the feedback received during the piloting. Preparation of the launch of the tools for the Volunteer Summer Summit, including simulations by the team on how to use the materials (FB, email, website),

July: printing final materials and finalising preparations for the presentation at the Volunteer Summer Summit

August: one of the project team members attends the Volunteer Summer Summit in Germany and presents the tools throughout the event. Launch of any tools aimed at learning of ECTP participants during the trimester exchange (September-November).

September: promote the use of the tools to the Intercultural Dialogue Day events, Closing up of the project.

Team profile

The team will consist of 4 people, of which 2 will be recruited through this call. The other 2 will be Elisa Briga (EFIL Advocacy, Project and Programme coordinator in charge of ECTP) and /or and EFIL intern, and an AFS representative with social entrepreneurship experience and Ashoka training, from Turkey.

The project team members that we are looking for should - among having an interest to develop creative material as mentioned above - have the following skills:

General Skills

• a capacity to work in (excellent) English;
• good communication and team work skills;
• able to work intensively for a long time with long-distance communication tools;
• reliability, self-drive and respect for deadlines;
• eagerness to learn and improve their own knowledge and skills.

Specific Requirements for this project (we need to have all these skills in the team, but not in one person, so if you have some of these skills you qualify J)

• creativity;
• belief in active citizenship & changemaking as a core mission of AFS programmes
• good understanding and preferably direct experience with the European Citizenship Trimester Programme;
• training experience on citizenship education;
• experience in developing educational material;
• graphic designing skills;
• video making skills;
• website designing skills;
• experience with designing online learning materials

Availability

• Two in person meetings are planned, each of 2 working days – the exact dates will be discussed once the team is composed. Ideally one meeting will take place in Brussels in January (any date among 9 - 16 and 20 - 26 January) and the other one in end of May/June (place to be decided).
• The educational materials should be finalised by end of March 2015, to be piloted at participants’ orientations and volunteer trainings between April and May.
• Each of the team members will be engaged in piloting the educational tools at chosen participants’ orientations and volunteer trainings between April and May in their countries.
• The finalised educational material should be ready in July in order to be presented and distributed at the Volunteer Summer Summit.
• One team member is expected to attend the Volunteer Summer Summit in Germany (August 2015).
• EFIL expects the team to be available for skype meetings and online cooperation throughout the whole process (January to September);

The costs related to participation in the project are covered by EFIL, including the piloting of the tools in the different countries.

If you wish to join the preparatory team of this project, please fill out the application form and return it to by Sunday, the 23^rd November 2014.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 634