March 26, D-Day!

Well, i can't quit now can i? blog time!

This particular blog entry is sponsored by the bulgarian team. The notes during the day was taken with the pen i recieved as a gift. Thank you!

Today we took the time summarizing the Open space events i mentioned yesterday. Since i talked about the groups i visited then, i will just add the groups i didnt have a chance to visit.

Fiona from Scotland had a group that talked about the Communicare Experience. The group's goal was to detail what Communicare had done for the participants that were present. It seemed that Fiona really got what she wanted out of it. I'll talk abit more about the Communicare way or try to at least later on here.

Next is none other than Mighty Mathias. His discussion was about EVS partnerships and the hopes that Sweden will be able to be very active in this area both sending and recieving. Key points are to try and cover the funding gaps and Sonic Boom will also try and start up an exchange activity (with some Fika, we hope!) with in her DJ tuition.

Tsvetina from Bulgaria had sadly gone home early but we managed to explain her group, New Project Ideas and Partnerfinding. they seemed to have discussed a 3.2 Multi action project. As only a participant in Communicare i have no idea what so ever what that is about, but i heard something about a nice idea about Choirs and EVS, whcih sounds really cool to me. Anything with music is awsome!

Another thing that was brought up was also the interest in having a Bank of Good Projects. Salto-Youth resource center was apparently a very good source of activities and methods to use for the purpose of building positive reactions in any of the eight key abilities.I will also try to motivate coaches in Communicare to maybe send their favourite method for different situations, and compile that into a pdf of some sorts and put it here for anyone to use.

Next is Oguz and His group, Health insurance and the comparance between countries. I got the impression that he got a good comparison between the countries in the group, they had spoken about the private hospitals and their very high prices for treatment, but also The Turkish Green Card application  for poor or unemployed. Seems to work a bit like swedish health care but with an application to it.

And then Annibale brightens the room with his italian heart! and i realised that his concept of being a good citizen actually is a very good description of what Communicare is about. Not until now i realised that being a citizen is not a way to serve the society. its a way to feel like you belong in the society, meaning, fighting for the right to not be excluded from the community and the general society.

I think Annibale will be able to bring home alot of good things for italy and their youth. Best of luck to you!

Then Fatih enters the scene. his group actually talke about something interesting. It can be described in a very deep philosophical way, which i think is very cool.

Basically it was about how youths are excluded from society and specifically how the comunity look down on unemployed youths and say "you're no good, you have no experiance, and having no experiance is bad". But the goal of the group was to try and turn that around and find ways to get them to fuse with the community and society.

Here comes the philosophy: If a youth is a piece of paper, and you want to draw a picture, which is the easiest: to use a blank peice of paper or a paper that already ahs a picture on it?

What i mean is, if you have a youngster that has no experiance, he can be molded to suit the company perfectly, and still contribute, because that person is a fresh set of ideas for the company. if the same company would hire someone who already ahve alot of experiance, it will be alot harder and take more time to mold that person to follow the guidelines of the company. Time is money, and to work harder might require more resources, hence it would be more cost effective to take the youth with a blank sheet of paper and motivation to learn and be inovative.

In short what we need to do is to teach the youth that inexperiance is not a flaw, but a perk. Also maybe investigate the possibiliy to give some incentive to companies int eh private sector to hire the youth with less experiance.

Gizem's group talked about Education systems and the comparison betwen countries. The subject is somewhat special for me because i've always thought the swedish educational system is a bit skewed in a way. durig primary school and secondary school it's considered bad to question the teacher. you're just supposed to accept everything and follow where the wand points at. then, suddenly University arrives and now you're supposed to question every syllable he or she spouts.

To me this didn't work so well, since it took me a bit longer to break free of the mindless "teacher says, monkey do" mentality. I think that there should be a larger transitional period, maybe ahve teachers flex during secondary school to allow arguments to arrise, since arguments requires creative thinking and creative thinking puts emphasis on talking steps learning.

At this stage we weren't that active, mostly because we were tired. But Mathias had that covered as well, pulling out some ropes and giving us a challenge. i think the excersise taught people that a problem isn't always solved by complicated solutions, and that if you keep trying you will eventually find the solution.

Martin from Bulgaria arrives next and in his prescense we managed to describe his group as a discussion of how not only to start a buisness but also how to plan for funding and buisness plans. We are quite fortunate with a strong social security network, so basically its just "Go for it" and you really don't risk anything. The story i told about with Erik and his clothing buisness shows that, i think. In this aspect Sweden is very lucky.

Next up is Photini's group that discussed Exclusion & youth exchange to motivate people. Basically taking about connecting Socially and greografically separated youths, ie people that are either in a social bad situation, or a person that lives far from any town, excluding the chances for that person to develop key qualities. i totally agree as well. Youth today really need help with this, and just looking to myself and what i have done this week, a youth exchange is definatly a way to grow selfesteem, but alos learning that traveling just to the neighbouring municipality is easy, especially compared to traveling teh european union.

Peter Waara a professor at the Luleå university gave us a very nice lecture about the social model of how youth fit in with the views of how work and employment should work, countered only by the will of the youths and their drive to not stagnate in the same thoughts as their fathers. I will try and get his presentation up and running on this blog next to the other files, because i really liked it.

Basically now, the model is like this: on the top level, the officals decide what the goals for youths are, and then continues to decide what their methods should be,a nd then the last level is to check what qualities and qualifications the youngster has. the problem here is that experience or lack there of is almost always put forward, lowering any existing selfesteem, turning down any ideas that deviates on the previous level's methods.

This thought pattern is diminishing the youth's chances to enter the labour market severely.

The Communicare way, is just as easy as keeping the levels, but flipping the direction. here, you start at the indiviadual level, finding out what that person wants to do (striving to convince the officials) and start doing some exercises. the next step is to define the methods that will help the youngster to reach his goals. this period becomes a sort of Trial & Error period, where the youth gets a grip on himself or herself and finds out about their personality.

The final step is to convince the officials that this method of thinking and motivating the youth is a much better way, which in itself is hard of course, but should actually be easier. What reason does officials have to not listen to a method that has gone through so many trial & errors and still have a very high success rate?

This description is lacking of course, especially compared to Waara's fine presentation. Hope i can get the files.

At this point i actually had to leave the seminar, to drive the scots to Karlstads airport (the one without the fancy-pantsy name). The week's tight schedule and the tempo and activites had made me quite tired and i felt a little bit of it when i was at the airport.

But i was glad that i could take them. I got to give a proper goodbye to three beautiful personalities which i think will bring back alot of inspiration and new ideas to their bridges project. best of luck to you, and we will meet again, i promise. Scotland is my second home now.

The night's events were tired. The food was good as always. the personell at the resturant has been serving a very nice menu all week and i've been in ecstacy every lunch and dinner. I think i can get Annibale our italian to sign that one as well!

We started off singing a Bulgarian song translated to be called something about swimsuits and lost love... yeah you figure that one out! it later turned into listening to some hits of the week among others "Små grodorna".

in a way i think everyone was reallly tired after the week. it was a bit hard to get going and i tihnk everyone was thinking about the fact that the week was about to end. But as a gift from the heavens we got to dance som italian dances. Perfect timing and i know everyone had fun doing that!

After some more cultural exchanges in music, we headed for the hotel and sat in teh breakfast room all of us, drinking some wine that had been left over. This is where it got dangerous. A large group of tightly knitted individuals, tired, drinking wine started talkinga bout projects... Well, let's just say that "Fika" will never be the same again!

As a first closing comment i want to say "Good bye all of you, for now. We will meet again i'm sure and until then best of luck to you in your endevours to bring motivation and help to our young unemployed".

This concludes the Blog about the event. Ti Hope we can keep these images as a resource on facebook. Tomorrow comes my finalizing entry, where everything that has happened to me will be disclosed while drinking some fine italian wine and even more pictures will be used!