Capacity Building of Partners in Athens

Two days, four organisations

In April, alongside the project’s second transnational meeting, staff from Kersnikova Institute, LATRA, Esplai Social and Youth Bridges Budapest spent two days in Athens initiating Activity A3.1, Capacity Building of Partners. 

What was covered

The programme worked through the material each partner will need to deliver locally: the FLOWGEN methodology developed under A2.2; blue economy education and its core concepts; stakeholder engagement and outreach; advocacy and policy engagement methods; the microcredential system and how recognition of skills actually works; preparation for the local trainings to come; and evaluation and impact monitoring.

Participants completed a self-assessment before the training and again afterwards, across each competence area, including their confidence to deliver local training and to support youth-led Blue Ventures. Those figures now form part of the A3.1 Training Report and feed the project’s impact evaluation. They are also, quietly, the most useful thing the training produced: they show where the consortium is strong and where it is not.

From eight to twenty-four

Here is the part that matters most, and it is happening now rather than in Athens. Each organisation committed to transferring what it learned to colleagues at home - four additional staff per partner, sixteen across the consortium. Together with those trained in Athens, that brings twenty-four people to a shared standard of practice.

These internal transfers are underway across the four countries as this article is published.

Where it leads

The point of training twenty-four people is not to train twenty-four people. Those staff will now support the training of 140 youth workers across Europe, under Activity A3.2. Those youth workers will in turn support 120 young people to build competences in the blue economy, entrepreneurship and green skills, with Youthpass recognition, from later this year.

What we took away

Training a trainer is not the same as training a practitioner. Colleagues who arrived confident in blue economy content found the harder question was how to hold a room of young people who have been told before that their participation matters and have learned not to believe it - a finding the focus groups had already surfaced, and which the training had to answer.

The consortium leaves Athens with a shared methodology, a working recognition system, and a clear-eyed sense of which sessions need more time when partners deliver them at home.