Call for Partners for Erasmus + Projects

This call is now closed. We would like to thank all the applicants and to let you know that 4 of the projects below were submitted. It will be refreshed in July-August,  for the next round of projects. If you wish to be informed of the next calls, you can get connected to the Equilitri Update.

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The Equilitri Network – Europe (www.i.equilitri.org) is looking for partners for several projects under Erasmus +

We are looking for organisations that are active in the field of personal development from EU countries or neighbouring countries. Priority will be given to:

– Training centers or organisations with extensive experience in organizing adult or youth courses

– Training companies/organisations who are successfully selling open courses on the free market

– Research institutes/Universities that show an interest in the personal development area

– Organisations that provide coaching, counseling, life-coaching, vocational counseling, career counseling/guidance, professional mentorship

For the 30th of April deadline we are preparing 5 projects in several European countries

– a Partnership building activity on the topic of personal development,

– a Networking project on the same topic

– a mobility project aiming to improve recruitment and selection process of participants in youth-projects

– an Equilitri Training of trainers

– an Equilitri Training course for youth-workers

Below you will find more detailed descriptions for each call:

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PBA – PD (K1)

This Partnership Building Activity aims to bring together organisations that work in personal development:
– Training centers or organisations with extensive experience in organizing adult or youth courses

– Training companies/organisations who are successfully selling open courses on the free market

– Research institutes/Universities that show an interest in the personal development area

– Organisations that provide coaching, counseling, life-coaching, vocational counseling, career counseling/guidance, professional mentorship

The PBA will last 5 days and will provide the space for discussion and development of projects in the field of personal and professional development under the auspices of the Equilitri Network. Location: Romania, Timis County
The participating organisations will have the opportunity to join the network.
Each partner organisation can send one delegate that has a mandate to discuss partnerships and can speak in the name of the organisation. The participant cannot be a person from outside the organisation or a volunteer that cannot speak in the name of the organisation. It is recommended that the participant you send has a decision role in the organisation (the president, director, vice-president, board member etc).

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Equilitri Network Project (K2)

This project will continue building the infrastructure for the Equilitri Network, focusing on developing Impact Assessment capabilities of the Equilitri Partner organisations (in simple terms, we want to be able to measure the impact of using the personal development method Equilitri using a monetary value. For example, we know that the cost per participant for an Equilitri training is 1000 euros, we want to measure the real life benefits of this course as a return on investment – we invested 1000 euros in this participant, what is the expected social return on investment, in euros) – for this we will use the SROI method of impact assessment.

Each partner organisation will be able to send 3 participants (2 trainers and one sociologist/statistician) for a one year Intensive Study Programme. The project will take place between September 2014-December 2015 in several countries (IT, RO, PT, LT, HR).
Please bear in mind that the participants have to be experts and will sign a 3 years retention contract (That means they will activate in your organisation a minimum of 3 years)

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Equilitri Training of Trainers (K1)

This is a one year Intensive Study Programme for experienced trainers. Each partner can send 2 trainers. It will take place from September 2014-September 2015 in several countries (RO, IT, LT, PT).
The trainers will be able to learn the Equilitri Method and deliver Equilitri training courses. They will deliver 2 courses under supervision and start delivering open courses after the ISP.
Please bear in mind that the participants have to be experts and will sign a 3 years retention contract (That means they will activate in your organisation a minimum of 3 years).

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HeadHunters (K1)

We are planning a multi-mobility project that aims to help our organisations find better participants/volunteers and diminish volunteers drop-out.

I will explain a little bit about the project, why it is necessary and how it will work. I will be quite blunt in the explanations, as these are problems that we are all confronted with. Please do not say Yes to this proposal without actually reading what it is about.

The project idea came out in Turkey last week when discussing the quality of participants to our youth projects. A fun-but-true and too often happening example (read “sad-but-true”) was given by a colleague trainer, Basia, who was telling me about a training on women empowerment for girls from rural areas. When asking the participants whether they actually work in this field or are interested to, few said yes, and when asking how many are actually from rural area, none. Unfortunately this is a situation that I’ve also met with in dozens of projects in so many countries. I delivered more than 300 trainings to date, and so many times this also happened to me. No matter the topic, the participants are rarely experienced or even intending to work in that field. Moreover, Youth in Action and other programmes have incubated a generation of training-hunters: people who have on their CVs participation to events on completely unrelated topics, who are more interested in visiting a foreign country for free than actually using the knowledge and skills they earn. Do you ever get applications from people that have been, for example, in a training course on ecology, then on inter-religious dialogue, then forum theatre, then origami then God-knows-what? If yes, this is a project that wants to fix this.

Another problem is that these people are rarely of any use to our organization, they do not keep in contact with us after returning from whatever mobility we’ve sent them in and they do not seem to understand that somebody worked really hard so that they could enjoy this opportunity, or the average 7-900 euro the European Commission spends so that they could go visit a foreign country. This leads me to think of the nice things we write in our project under “How will the participants impact their community” and the reality where they do not actually have any impact.

Also, sometimes we have to reach out to target groups that are not easily reachable through email/Facebook/YahooGroups etc. This project will look into how to reach out to them better.

If in your organization you have never encountered these problems or you already found a way to fix them, we want you there to tell us how you did it.

So, the project idea is to take from each partner the person (volunteer/employee) that is usually in charge with recruiting/managing the volunteers/participants/beneficiaries. One, maximum 2 per partner. These people will go together through a one year learn-and-apply mix:
1. Mobility one, they come to a 7 days training course where they learn how to recruit and reach out. Content will include how to make a call for participants, where to publish it or how to disseminate it offline, how to reach specific target groups, how to screen out the tourists, project-hunters, groupies and other undesirables, how to connect the opportunity with the needs of the organization, how to organize a proper long distance interview etc. During this training course they will make and launch at least one call for participants (for real, not just practice). We will connect this project with the projects of the Equilitri Network to make sure we have at least one or two events happening in parallel at that time.
2. They go home and within a period of 6 months, they manage the call, launch other calls, interview applicants, select candidates and receive feed-back on the quality of the participants they selected based on a standard format from the project manager(s). They will monitor all the participants they selected/recruited to see whether they have actually used the skills/knowledge they developed, whether they stayed in the sending organization after the project, whether they disseminated the project or brought any added value to our organisations.
3. After the 6 months of implementing and monitoring, they meet again in another country for a workshop where they analyse what happened, what went well or not so well, what we can change etc. To this they will add new skills about how to motivate your volunteers, how to evaluate them and how to prevent them from going away from your organization. With this improved knowledge they will try again.
4. They go for a second period of 6 months when they do it again, and do it better. Plus they will work on motivation and evaluation.
5. With the results of the second implementation period, they meet again, in a third location, for the last workshop, where they put together all good and bad experiences in a small down-to-earth as brief as possible guide that we can use internally in all our organisations and also disseminate to other organisations.

The participants to this project will sign a Retention Agreement that they undertake to participate to the whole project and will stay with the organization for a minimum of 3 years.

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If you think this project is useful for your organization and you wish to be a partner, let us know.
If you have experience in the topic, and you can provide an expert or a trainer, let us know on which specific topic.
If you wish to host one of the 3 events, let us know.