For the last ten days we were in Zadar organizing Erasmus+ training course “Strategic planning – step by step”. The main goal of the project was to empower youth workers and peer educators through improving their skills and competencies in the field of strategic planning that will later lead to improved strategic vision and developed plans for each organisation. Training course gathered 33 participants from various European countries such as Croatia, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden.
The project consists of two main activities: a training course and an evaluation meeting. At least half of the participants of this training course will be invited to take part in an evaluation meeting, after the follow-up activities in local communities.
In the beginning of the training course, participants were getting to know each other. They talked about their NGOs, learning objectives and expectations from this training course. On the first weekend, we had opportunity to visit some parts of Zadar and we organized intercultural evening where we tasted all the beautiful food from various countries. On first Monday, we got deeply into the topic of training course and started with the first educational workshop about strategic planning, about its process and who needs to be involved in it. We did two educational sessions about stakeholders and SWOT analysis.
After educational workshops about strategic planning and swot analysis, we discussed tools that are used for strategic planning. PESTLE, Two simple questions, Portfolio analysis and Priorisation exercise were the tools that we talked about. During these sessions participants learned to understand all external factors that may impact the work of their organisations, they went through NGOs documents about mission, vision and values and learned how to re-evaluate them, they learned to analyse the ongoing, past and present projects/programmes of an NGO. In the last session they learned to explore what activities (according to the mission and values of the NGO) are the most essential to us. This whole training activity was concluded with “What’s YouthPass” and with evaluation of the training course.
Objectives of the training course were:
1.) To enhance cooperation between our youth workers and organizations,
2.) To improve our local and international teamwork by getting to know stages of group development and how to communicate in an assertive and effective way,
3.) To share info about our organizations, their visions, missions and values,
4.) To get to know the importance of the strategic planning process and how and why it can benefit our organizations,
5.) To provide youth workers with practical tools of Strategic planning which they will be able to use in the future and which will contribute to their professional development and also to organizations’ development,
6.) To explore the Erasmus+ program as a tool that can help to achieve the objectives of our Strategic Planning,
7.) To reflect on the experience of the learning process using the Youthpass certificate and frame of 8 key competencies.
