Day six was the day we started building. One of the goals of this project is to produce real, shareable resources an NVC Handbook and a series of video tutorials that youth workers across Europe can actually pick up and use. So we split the group into multicultural teams and let people choose where to contribute based on their strengths. Writers wrote, designers designed, the camera people set up shots, and the people who’d never made a video before learned on the job. There’s something special about watching forty people from eight countries build something together that didn’t exist that morning.
The handbook is being put together as a practical, no-nonsense guide case studies from real youth work situations, exercises you can run in your own organisation, scripts for difficult conversations, and the kind of stuff you wish someone had handed you on your first day on the job. The video tutorials are shorter, punchier, designed for social media and quick training sessions. Both will be freely available, in multiple languages, once the project’s dissemination phase kicks in.
The afternoon was for finishing the work and presenting it. Each group showed what they’d built to the rest of the participants, and we invited members of the local community to come and watch. Having fresh eyes in the room was useful local guests asked questions the group hadn’t thought of, pointed out where things could be clearer, and shared their own perspectives on how these materials might land in their context. It also boosted the project’s visibility in Nova Gradiška, which is one of the small but important parts of running an international training course in a local community.
Reflection closed out the working day, and then the evening turned into a self-organised Karaoke Night. This is when you discover which of your colleagues have been secretly nursing a dream of being a pop star, and which ones really should have stayed in the audience. Either way, it’s exactly the kind of group bonding you can’t plan for.