Seminar "Youth Leadership for Advocacy" in Spain

The seminar ‘Youth Leadership for Advocacy’ took place in Spain, Vilanova i la Geltru from 10.01.2022 to 17.01.2022.

The 4 general objectives of the seminar were:
-To understand advocacy as part of our role as youth NGOs.
-To learn how to encourage and support young people to take leadership as advocates.
-To focus on the knowledge, skills and attitudes which are necessary to advocate successfully and collect
valid tools and activities to develop and recognize advocating as a competence.
-To promote exchange and networking among youth workers and NGOs active in the field of non-formal and
intercultural learning, volunteering, active social inclusion and youth empowerment.

The 4 key competences were:
1) Leadership; 2) effective communication; 3) networking; 4) campaigning.

The first day we focused on "ice breaker" exercises.
We received a Todo list, which had different tasks to complete by the end of the seminar.
For example:
*Take a smiley picture with 2 local people
*Learn a song from one of your colleague's country
*Learn a cooking recipe from a different country

The hotel was great. The food was tasty, the weather was amazing, the group was awesome. I loved how experienced everybody was in this group and how wide range of knowledge they had. The city was beautiful and the local people were lovely.

All the days were packed with activities, we started at 9.30 and ended our day at 19.00. I was never bored and there was always something to do. The project was structured very well. First we learned some theory and some tools and then we tried making a campaign and gathered thoughts for the next project.

I loved the backstories on our assignments and it was a lot more interesting to do the assignments. It wasn't like OK go try to make a campaign and use the tools we learned. They said something like uh oh.. a person from the EU parliament called and they need our help, because they know we got so many bright heads here together so we need to make some campaigns and make sure you'll get them done by 18.00 because they are waiting.

We had a whole travel day in Barcelona. We had a guided tour from 10.00 to 12.00 and then we went to eat lunch at a FresCo restaurant. We were able to eat everything and as much as we want. We ate for 2 hours and then we had free time to do whatever we want in Barcelona until 22.00. I went to see the Sagrada Familia building and hiked to Park Güelle to see the sunset.

I had an awesome time. I learned a lot about Europe and developed many new skills. Many people in the group were saying that this is the best project they've been to, and they've been to a lot of projects. So I'm really glad this was the first project I participated in.

- Richard