Erasmus+ ESC Stars of Europe Online Course

Learn How to Make REAL Youth Exchanges!

Whatever you have heard about youth exchanges before or however you have organised them before, this training will teach you how to make youth exchanges like they meant to be!

You will learn how to support young people to initiate and run their own projects, but not to make the projects for them.

Focus on involvement and partnership

The original idea of a youth exchange is a long-term learning process for the groups of young people in participating countries. Young people are involved in a process, where they come up with an idea for a project, they choose the topic for it and design the activities for its programme. They run the activities directly themselves and plan dissemination activities for other young people and their peers.

Every step of the process is about learning – the more young people are take active role in the process, the more new learning situations they end up in. In The Star of Europe, we will dive into all the steps of youth exchange projects, to see how young people can take active roles at all levels of a project and learn different things throughout of it.

We will also look at how if young people in each participating countries can be the main part of the process – so that to provide equal learning opportunities for all youth groups but not only the for hosting one.

Unlike how many youth exchanges are organised, we want to promote the original idea of youth exchanges – and let the youth exchanges to be young people’s own projects, not projects planned by adults for young people.

Digital material supporting your process

The Star of Europe has also its own extensive digital materials, which based on the printed materials that were produced earlier. Now both of these materials exist side by side, and the digital materials are always available to be used together with partners and the young people.

Each step includes Learning Badges that young people can earn while working on the different elements of project planning. The badges show you the progress in your process and help the young people to see their involvement. After the process the badges help you and your young people to see what learning experiences you will forward to the Youthpasses.

During the training the digital materials will be used so that the participants will gain experience in how to use them when they go back home to work with young people.

If you want to see what is available or start using the Star of Europe materials, please go to starofeurope.eu

Aims and objectives

The aim of “The Star of Europe” is to get a comprehensive understanding of what a youth exchange project contains – from the idea, needs assessment of a project to the follow up activities. More specifically, the main objectives are:

1) To become familiar with the whole logic of life cycle of a youth exchange project

2) To increase the understanding of the value of full involvement of young people in youth exchanges

3) To become aware of  learning opportunities of the young people within youth exchanges

4) To pay extra attention to the equal partnership and encourage partners to plan, prepare, implement and report the project together

5) To get acquainted with a Star of Europe digital platform as a tool for support of youth exchanges

Training for newcomers and experienced

If you work regularly with youth groups, professionally or voluntarily, you are a good participant in this training. As a youth worker, youth leader or group leader, you already have a group of interested young people or an idea, how to find an interested group to work with.

You can be a newcomer or someone who has already organised youth exchanges, but has not involved young people in the planning of the projects before.

You will have to be over 18 years old. We prioritise applicants who work directly with a group of young people and who are interested in forming partnerships for future projects.