Patras Youth Center is an organization with active and motivated young people that aims to promote free educational, cultural, art, sport and social activities. Patras Youth Club is set up to provide these young people with activities designed to keep them off the streets and out of trouble, and to give them an interest in activity and community to contribute their time, effort and talent to meet someone’s need.
In this direction, serves the dual purpose of accommodating unstructured social interaction among different age groups and providing instructional seminars all in a safe, supervised environment, conferences trainings, study visits for youth on the international, national and local levels; as well as coordinating international youth volunteer exchanges.
Its goal and purpose are to assist and encourage youths in Patras to maximize their independency and integration into the community. Furthermore, effecting a long-lasting change and attitudes in the community about youths and young adults. Through European Programs, we aim to broaden the horizons of local youth coming from the broad area of the city of Patras as well as rural areas around the city and breaking down barriers to create a genuine single environment for knowledge, research and innovation.
We are working in different fields: Personal development, saving the environment, implementing non-formal educational methods, increasing Social media and IT tools, promoting social entrepreneurship, active citizenship, volunteerism and etc. Our organization actively works to develop and provide people with important social skills and knowledge through non-formal education. We have developed strong partnerships with local and regional authorities to give young people a chance to acquire new experiences in youth policy development and implementation. On top of that, we have created strong partnerships with organizations coming from EU and beyond. Our collaboration is based on mutual respect, and knowledge sharing. SALTO played an important role in meeting some of these partners.
Through different projects, we help youth to improve their citizenship and understanding towards solidarity, peace and the EU values. The strong group of employees working in our association have developed several locals, regional and national project-activities We have experience in conducting workshops and activities for youth, adults, and seniors. Their daily work is task-oriented and various. We develop and implement projects connected to human rights, democracy, active citizenship, gender equality, minorities, entrepreneurship, and social and environmental problems.
In particular, we are actively working on local and on international level:
We organize workshops training courses for young people to reveal their entrepreneurial skills to enter business and labor market. Through these activities we want create a great opportunity to produce change and remove barriers that may hinder the natural evolution of social entrepreneurship in our region, largely due to poor development of skills of youth workers in this segment of entrepreneurship.
In 2019, we started actively working on international projects. So far we had 9 successful international projects. Among them, we are coordinator of three KA105 projects.
International Experienced in Environmental issues: We have been working on the projects “Green life”; Save the Earth – Save yourself”, “YE Live Green – save Green”.
International Experienced in implementing non formal educational methods: We have been working on the projects: NON FORMAL EDUCATION IN ACTION and Be a change Maker.
International Experienced in Social Entrepreneurship: We have been working on the project: “Let’s Turn idea into action”. We would like to highlight that for this project, we were the applicant organization as well as the main coordinator. The project was selected by the Greek NA as an Erasmus+ Youth Exchange Good Practise.
International experience on Personal development – tolerance and democracy: We have been working on the projects: “Respect Differences” and “Accept and Respect”.
Our members /volunteers are involved in international training activities, they are English speakers, have experience in international cooperation and project development. They are qualified and acknowledged adequately to provide a high quality of work in certain areas. They are mainly students with different specializations. They bring vast experience and valuable ideas, throughout their personal participation in international projects, workshops and conferences. With our volunteers, we have completed several projects too. We actively work with different groups of people to realize their needs and interest equally.
Last but not least, although the topics that we are mainly working are the environment, climate change and inclusion, over the last year we have worked on an application regarding sports (i.e., Peace and Sport, KA152-YOU-D6976DA8), while we have extensively been working on applications regarding healthy lifestyle and wellbeing. For instance, in our last application, namely Connect with Nature for Well-being and Motivation, KA152-YOU-ACAFFEAC, we attempted to make a connection of well-being and nature/environment showing how important is to protect and preserve the nature to achieve our personal well-being. Thus, we strongly believe that our motivated members can bring innovative ideas and be a valuable asset on your team towards the completion of this application, and afterwards its successful implementation and dissemination.
We are 3 persons, active Erasmus+ participants since we were children, passionate about traveling and being part of projects. We were volunteers and trainers in Achaia Adult Education Institute since 2012 where we (i) participated in Erasmus+ youth exchanges and training courses, (ii) led sessions and workshops in over 10 Erasmus+ youth exchanges and training courses, (iii) led the Greek team as group leaders, and (iv) organized dissemination activities in Patras for the implemented projects. Afterwards and after gaining experience in applying, organizing, managing and implementing Erasmus+ youth exchanges and training courses, we created our own informal group of young people in 2019 with the vision change the landscape of opportunities for the youth in the city of Patras.
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