TITLE: Challenge Yourself
TYPE: Short-term projects for mobility of learners and staff in adult education
DATES: 01/12/21 – 31/05/2023
COORDINATOR: L’ORMA (Italy)
Partners:
NGO NEST BERLIN (Germany) – https://ngonest.de/
BULSPORT (Bulgaria) – https://www.bulsport.bg/
NECI (Cyprus) – https://necieu.wixsite.com/neci
THE PROJECT
L’Orma, founded in 2000, is a non-profit educational agency that promotes the Non-Formal-Education, the Social-Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship to offer teachers, educators and parents the best possible training experiences aimed at their personal and professional growth.
Since 2014, it has also played a role on the European stage, as both partner and applicant on Erasmus+ projects. Because of this recent growth and more encompassing outreach, L’Orma, in the beginning of 2019, worked on an enveloping internal analysis over its current structure and the competences of its staff members. Throughout the process, it emerged that L’Orma encountered difficulties expanding due to its organizational structure, which was not clearly defined. This generated a three-year internal reorganizational plan which is still ongoing.
The work being done in light of this three-year plan is aimed at increasing L’Orma’s internal management, presence on the European stage and offer towards adult learners. For years most of our efforts have been put towards the development of training experiences for educators, trying to involve a higher number of professional every year. However, this has led our sustainability to significantly depend on this service which, apart from being seasonal, is also unstable, as Covid-19 restrictions have proved to us. Therefore, we deem it important to improve the outreach of #NotFormalTeacher (aimed at training teachers in innovative approaches) and #NotFormalParents (which offers non-formal education trainings and team building events to parents and adults).
L’Orma’s staff is mainly formed by educators and teachers that are trained in Physical Education and other human and artistic disciples, but, due to the complexity of the put into practice of Non-Formal Education and Education Through Sport approaches, our workers need to be trained even further in order to develop a truly versatile and prepared staff. Our educators would benefit from participating in high-quality learning opportunities that grant them the knowledge and competences to make use of these non-formal methodologies with the diverse target groups that we work with.
Furthermore, this internal reorganization, which has evolved L’Orma towards a more vertical structure, has been capitalizing on existing human resources within the organization, rather than bringing in external resources. A good example are the various project managers operating within L’Orma, who all used to work within schools (as educators or sports instructors) and were promoted due to their interest in helping develop L’Orma’s activities. This, however, has showed an internal lack in the organization’s staff members when it comes to project management competences, most importantly on matters of leadership and communication.
It was decided that participating in an Erasmus + KA1 project would help us to work on the growth of the organization both locally and internationally, because it is also in our interest to extend our network of partner organizations in order to participate in more transnational activities under the scope of #ORMAInternational. Considering the needs portrayed in this analysis, L’Orma wants to capitalize on partners’ experience in these areas (adult education and management). Focusing on European good practices in the area of project management will allow it to play a bigger role on the European stage and increase its abilities as both partner and applicant in Erasmus+ projects, as well as having a greater local impact through its various activities.
Objectives
Objective 1: To offer high-quality training experiences to our educators focused on Non-Formal Education and Education Through Sport with adult targets.
This objective is related to our goal to develop multidisciplinary staff regarding Non-Formal Education. We believe that less traditional teaching methods, like ETS, can be helpful in promoting life-long learning and intercultural dialogue among adults, and that is why we want to focus on these approaches. Achieving this objective will directly improve our teaching services, which should be appreciated by our target group at a local level. We expect that by putting more efforts towards the promotion of activities with adult learners we will diversify our financial income, which is of great importance at the moment to achieve sustainability.
Based on our experience with the Erasmus + program, international experiences and trainings have an added value in terms of competence acquisition both in terms of working and social skills. Therefore, we would prefer for the training opportunities offered to our staff to have a transnational scope that benefits from the experience of more experienced organizations within our network.
Objective 2: To foster the development of the competences of our staff in the areas of project management, with a specific focus on leadership and communication.
The management and execute staff, as stated, does not have a formal background in how to lead on organization and coordinate big scale projects, which has a negative impact in our international growth and in the quality of the implementation of activities and events. These developments that we wish to achieve are part of L’Orma’s internal three-year development and restructuring plan, which is changing the organization into a more vertical and project-oriented structure. If done correctly, this evolution will allow L’Orma to offer more activities to its target groups (educators, teachers, sport instructors, parents) and to play a bigger role on the social entrepreneurship stage as well. A lack of internal organization will, in the long term, hinder the organization in its daily activities and will block it from reaching its target groups optimally.
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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.
