BUTI goes to Uganda
Uganda,
The place of traffic, lazy mosquitoes and inspirational people, place of limited internet and unlimited opportunities.
On the 24th of January two representatives from Open Space Foundation left the cold Sofia for a week and took a long journey to Uganda. It was exhausting, but totally worthy, not only for the endless summer, but also for the incredible people we found there.
In the beginning of 2017 Open Space Foundation(Bulgaria) Started a big project called “Art and Culture for Unity”, with the support of Erasmus+ program, in collaboration with different organizations from Europe and Africa: Soul Xpressions (Uganda), Chamwino Arts Centre (Tanzania) , Mine Vaganti (Italy); Forming BUTI all together.
Among the activities conducted, BUTI shuffled volunteers, hosted study visits, organized youth exchange and finally the time arrived for us to move to Uganda for a training course.
The aim of the training course was to create twenty approved projects for social improvement and in the same time to implement the participants themselves, making them able to plan and write their own project proposals.
Twenty-five youth workers took part in the project as participants and facilitators.
This training course was very useful and innovative because we used creative facilitation to go through activities for evaluation of personal skills, Problem and Solution tree method, S.W.O.T. and S.M.A.R.T.models, planning, presenting and feedback giving on the personal projects; and reaching the point of project writing on template, budgeting and signing the final contracts.
As an outcome we reached our goal of having twenty approved projects in fields of social and environmental improvement, sexual education, promoting cultural awareness, entrepreneurship, healthy lifestyle, expand the influence of the local NGOs, working with refugees, promotion of literature, tools for understanding new media and guidance for choosing right profession among youngsters.
This training course was so intensive (we couldn’t even find a gap to go around discovering the beauties of Uganda), although we had limited time, we accomplished all the goals we listed at the beginning.
This project was very productive and applicable for the social workers involved.
However, the hard time is only beginning: each personal project will have one-hundred-euro support and three months’ time to be implemented.
We, as BUTI, can’t wait to see the final result of the Ugandan training and how far the new born projects will arrive in future.
See you soon!
The project “Art and Culture for Unity” held with financial support of European program “Erasmus+”, Key Action 2: Capacity building in the field of youth
