Offline is not off-putting

Project number: 2018-3-EE01-KA105-051235

Countries and partners:

APV: 13.04-14.04.2019 (+ 2 days of travel)

Project Dates: 10.05.2019 – 15.05.2019 (+ 2 travel days 09.05 – arrival, 16.05 – departure)

Participants: 15-19 years old, leader 18

Group per country:

5 participants + 1 leader

Venue:

Tammispea village, Suburban camp Vihasoo, APV will be organised in Tallinn, in NGO Youth Club Active youth centre (Võru 11, Tallinn)

Description of the project:

The project aimed at promoting active lifestyle among the youth 15-19 y.o., encouraging them to spend more time offline and outdoors, and to find activities that would bring positive emotions personally to them. We aimed to give the pax practical skills, ideas and inspiration for spending time disconnected from gadgets. Since in a modern world, people – especially youngsters – tend to spend too much time in front of computers and mobile phones and sedentary, we thought it reasonable to promote different alternatives (nature, sports, social, cultural, educational activities) among the growing generation.

We aimed to show the youngsters that being not constantly online can be diverse and interesting by encouraging them to devote more time to offline activities and to explore their surroundings, to develop interest and caring attitude towards the areas where they live, thus becoming citizens more active.

The youth were engaged in a variety of games, cultural activities, quests, hikes, practical workshops and discussions, which all were carefully preplanned to help us in achieving the goal and motivate the participants. To sum up, the main idea was to offer the youth different ways to spend their free time away from the gadgets, to promote healthy and developing activities in different surroundings, and to share some practical skills and entertaining outdoor and sports activities.

The objectives were:

– to increase awareness of the positive aspects of spending time offline and actively;

– to promote a variety of free time activities and their goals beside entertainment, to broaden their

outlook and stimulate interest in exploring their surroundings;

– to motivate young people to spend more time outdoors, to disconnect from the gadgets and internet,

and to enjoy communication in an unfamiliar environment;

– to share experience and knowledge related to opportunities of leisure both in nature and within city

limits;

– to discover new cultures through traditional outdoor games and cuisine, to promote intercultural

dialogue, to find new friends from other countries;

– to practice skills of foreign languages and to reduce the barriers existing in communication in

foreign languages;

– to experience non-formal learning through methods of hiking, games, discussions, teamwork,

practical workshops;

– to encourage developing curious and mindset and caring for environment and city through spending

time outdoors;

– to increase and develop a variety of skills and competences in frames of non-formal learning, as

well as to explain the role of YouthPass in the self-reflection process;

– to develop a post-project informative session and an activity related to the project topic, to be later

conducted in the participating countries and shared online.

The project involved 32 young people from 5 countries, and at the end of it the participants indeed stated having become more motivated to spend less time in front of computer games or gadgets and more time outdoors. They have found the topic very important for their daily life and have learned of different possibilities to spend leisure time. We successfully encouraged the youth to become curious about their cities and countries, to discover what their areas have to offer in terms of leisure activities, and empowered them to create some (simple) opportunities themselves. Additionally, we have expanded their horizons by providing information about Erasmus+ programme (as many of the pax were first-timers in youth exchanges) and motivating to take part in international projects in the future.

Photos – https://business.facebook.com/pg/youthclubactive/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2006757089452763

Video of the project