The Danish training weekend of “No Stress - Your Success” took place on the weekend of 15th of November 2019. The objective, which the team developed during the initial training course in Estonia, was to address stress among young people ages 16 to 24.
The plan was to introduce participants to the tools that the team learned in Estonia and together build a campaign to address the issue. As a team, we have had many discussions on how to do this, and we have faced severe difficulties. That being said, we did manage to carry out a training weekend in Denmark. We think that we managed to get the participants engaged and have good discussions about stress and what challenges young people face, which was what we wanted all along. We believe that the planned workshop enabled participants to have critical reflections on stress and how to deal with it.
The three team members (Emma, Kamma and Søren) and seven participants were present. We welcomed the participants with some energizers and name games. We also had an initial brainstorm on the topic of stress that we call “From Cave Man to Stress Man”, where we asked participants to identify what stressful elements that have been added to the human lives throughout history. Next, there was a session that explained what the Council of Europe, European Youth Foundation and Shokkin Group International are, as well as the goal of the European Activist Factory. We also discussed some facts about stress and youth in Denmark.
After this, we gave participants an introduction to activism and campaigning and asked them to make a “problem tree” to identify causes and effects of stress among young people. The next day we asked the participants to investigate two campaigns, “Humans of New York” and “ABC for mental sundhed”. We asked them to identify target group, tool, sender and main message and reflect on how these tools could be used for our campaign. Then, we had a good discussion on the usefulness of different campaigning tools. Then we proceeded to share experiences of tricks that has worked for us personally to reduce stress.
This turned out to be a fruitful discussion with good input from participants, and we ended up phrasing 12 hacks or advices to help young people to slow down in their everyday lives. We have made these 12 hacks into a poster in order to share the good ideas with others. We imagine that participants can print and put up the poster in their schools and share it with their friends via social media.
The training went very well, and participants were engaged and provided good input. We received good feedback from participants expressing that the training had been interesting. They particularly emphasized that the training had felt like a safe space where they could share feelings about stress. We were glad to hear this, as that was out intention with creating the training in the first place.
#ActivistFactory #Shokkinint #eyfcoe #Denmark
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