Youth Growth through positive environmental engagement
Today we are going to start a new series of articles, this time honouring the work and practice of our colleague and friend eco-trainer and coach Eleni Michail from Cyprus, who offers us a hands-on practical approach to linking youth development to nature’s processes and the More-Than-Human world.
Our first article is an introduction to the free handbook and toolkit Eleni developed jointly with Ognian Gadoularov and Bogdan Romanica, called “Seeds of Chain” which contains theories on growth through nature’s approaches and positive approaches, and most of all non-formal education tools, and it is free an accessible to all.
Seeds of Change is a toolkit that can be used to enhance the impact of Youth work on the social
integration of disadvantaged youth – their personal, social and professional development. It is also a tool for acknowledging and highlighting the importance of Youth work and for increasing its quality. The creation of the manual “Seeds of Change – cultivating of authentic growth of youth” is a result of the EU supported project “Moving Beyond – innovative learning tools for personal and professional development of youth”. One of the outcomes of the project was creation of an adapted approach based on Ecocentric development (ECD), Positive Psychology (PP) and nature based learning (NBL) to be used in the context of social integration and work with disadvantaged youth. The manual offers a theoretical part and a set of practical methods for direct implementation when working with young people. The content is based on data from scientific literature on the topic and analysis of practical experiments and experience conducted during the project. This manual opens new opportunities for the youth sector, offering innovative methodologies that could be easily incorporated in various formats of Youth work . You can download the full manual here.