Stronger Youth – Empowering young people social competences and soft skills through peer mentoring”

The project contributed to the first stage of prevention by empowering youngsters through the most suitable channel of communication: their peers. The main aim of the project was to support the organisation of the peer mentoring process by providing methods for prospecting volunteers among resilient youngsters and offering them tools for working with and supporting their peers who were at risk of depression or social exclusion.

Project objectives

• Setting up the framework of communication with youngsters – providing the on-line tool for recruiting resilient youngsters who could be volunteers.
  
• Creating a set of activities that could be provided by peer mentors to mentees in such a way that common activities developed and improved social resilience by learning and training soft skills and social competences.
  
• Providing the know-how for educators on how to work with youngsters who could become peer mentors as volunteers.

Target groups

• Despite the impression that the most important target group were young people at risk of depressive behaviour, the authors of the project strongly emphasised that the main target group were teenagers. It was important to understand that the project was aimed at young people who, thanks to cooperation, were to realise the idea of inclusion through peer self-help. Therefore, the recipients were both young people exposed to depressive factors and those who, thanks to their social and mental resilience, could get involved in the prevention of depression among young people. The activation assumed by the project concerned both groups of young people – both parties had to cooperate and create, nurture, share and disseminate common values in order to achieve the project’s goals.
• The second group of recipients were educators: professionals from all institutions dealing with youth. The process of peer mentoring required introduction and professional monitoring. However, it had to be participatory monitoring, not meddling. An additional, indirect group of recipients were all stakeholders: decision-makers of the educational process, school teachers and parents of adolescents. The implementation of the project made it possible to understand communication processes and reach the generation particularly exposed to the dangerous factors of the modern world.

Results

1. Methodology along with the complete set of tools to conduct the process of peer mentoring in order to prevent depressive behaviours and social exclusion among young people.
    
2. On-line skill assessment tool that examined social and communication skills and gave feedback in order to become a mentor or to improve.
    
3. Guide for educators on how to supervise the mentoring process, as well as a set of activities for mentors and mentees for common activities that developed social and psychological resilience.

Added value

The project directly referred to what was very important in a world where a huge number of values from different cultures were mixed: it gave the opportunity to establish and strengthen relationships between people, starting with the young generation, which was particularly exposed to growing up in a sense of isolation and loneliness. The diversity of partners allowed for a wide application of the methodology and project results in many fields. Each of the partners equally used the effects of joint effort for the benefit of the community that is Europe, working with the young generation on whom the future of the European Union would depend.

Planned activities:

A conference was held in each partner country to disseminate the project results. 

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.