The Y.M.C.A. PARTHENOPE ONLUS is a non-profit and free association founded in 2004, independent from every other civil or religious organization, composed by young people which intend to promote the development of their intellectual, social, spiritual and physical personality. The association promotes therefore study travels, meetings, debates, lectures, and any other initiative to improve and develop the cultural exchanges among young people on the historical, geographical, artistic, naturalistic and environmental realities of all the countries in the world. For this purpose the association develops publishing activities and publish bulletins and newspapers; it promotes tourist activities and organizes training courses and/or delegate such kind of activities to corporate bodies able to train them, it organises programs with other partners and advertise them in order to promote its own initiatives, including strategies of communication and action tools to create, modify or/and to improve its own social activities. We organize summer camps for children, regular excursions, visits and youth activities ; we host political refugees, teach them Italian, their rights and support them in integration opportunities. We also participate in and/or organize intercultural exchanges and training programs in Italy and abroad for people with and without disabilities.
The YMCA Parthenope ONLUS has a consolidated experience in transnational and educational projects. We have worked with teenagers, young adults and youth workers on one hand with the European Youth, Youth in Action & Erasmus’ Programs, on the other hand we coperated with anumber of national and regional Italian programmes. We have developed a number of good practises spanning from the logistical organization to the content-based education relying mainly on the arts such as theatre, dance and music. Our youth Centres are in Poggio Mirteto (near Rome in Central Italy), in S. Giorgio del Sannio (Benevento) and Naples (South Italy) whereas in Motta (Benevento) we have founded the Civic School of Arts “Alma d’Arte”, a consortium of 5 local associations. Our staff is well prepared, they all speak Italian and English, at least, and includes several trainers, youth workers, volunteers and support staff. To ensure that participants can learn proficuously, we adopt the “Experiential Learning Methodology”, also known as the “Learning by Doing Methodology”. The theoretical discussion follows the activities, so the participants can be spontaneous in all the activities and workshops as they used to do when they were children. The direct experience of the happenings determins the first and deepest learning. Unlike then and better than then, after the activities, in the reflections and evaluation, the experiential learning adds intellectual and analytical tools to guarantee awareness of growth. The”Experiential Learning Methodology” will stem, then, into the “Educator to Learner” and the “Peer to Peer” Methodologies. Our experience which we will mainly provide in this project is based on street and social theatre : young people realise their life play in order to develop competences, life skills, self-confidence while casting an eye on the self-employment and social responsibility.
As agreed with all the other partners, the YMCA Parthenope ONLUS will offer and provide the skills, competences and expertise of their youth leaders, trainers and coordinators in the following areas, the core of our Partnership:
1) Communication: to take care of the clarity and operational efficiency among all the stake-holders of this project; to inform each other in the phases of preparation, implementation, follow-up, dissemination and evaluation.
2) Logistics: to organise and advice about the hosting, travelling and well-being of all participants.
3) Education: to design the best learning and training activities tailored to the partners’ needs and participants’ learning goals.
4) Supervision: to reach satisfactory results and proper evaluation of the progress made.
5) Opportunities: to offer further learning or implementation of the results achieved through new expenses connected to this Partnership local and international activities.
6) Administration: to handle smoothly the documentation, outputs and financial duties.
