TRAINING COURSE ON GRAPHIC FACILITATION „MAKE IT VISUAL” IN VILNIUS

The Training Course „MAKE IT VISUAL” took place in the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, from 16th until the 22nd of November 2019 organized by the Centre of Creativity and Innovations (VšĮ Kūrybingumo ir inovacijų centras) and co-founded by Erasmus+. It gathered 31 youth workers from Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

We were located in very fine eLoft Hotel, just 15 minutes by foot from the old centre of the city. That was a great deal because we were sometimes able to go to the centre and explore it. That is how we also visited the infamous independent Republic of Užupis (the neighbourhood in Vilnius) and an exhibition at the contemporary art centre. We also had some time to do sightseeing and to explore the city, meet the culture and people of this Baltic state, which was a very worthy experience.

Vilnius <3
Serious introduction to the serious training course

This Training Course was a very serious and professional one. It gathered together people of different age (from 18 to 50) that came to get some useful knowledge in graphic facilitation that can later be used on the workplace and in the community. There was a lot of NGO members, teachers and even professors on the universities and I have involved myself in this training course as member of Association Strive! That is why the quality of interaction was on a very high level and why every member of the project was able to learn something from the other one, whether it comes to business experience, culture, language, self-development or life experience. It was thrilling to see and hear such a big amount of quality ideas interlinked and shared.

A second important reason for this TC being such a good one were trainers. Julia and Max are two very capable individuals who – in combination – made a perfect balance between professional approach and (little) time to relax. Julia showed us how a TC in graphic facilitation should be done. She presented to us many different toolkits connected with visual presentation and stated many times: „I studied all of this by myself, now I present it here for you guys. I am giving you the gold, the knowledge so that you don’t need to read so many books as I did. Take advantage of it!” And seriously, we got a lot. Many participants will use this skills on their workplaces, whether they work with children (so they need to teach them something) or they run an NGO (so they need to present something to people and educate them). On the other side, Max was able to lead the program very skillfully, so we always had a feeling there is something that he does different and more interesting than the others while he was finding a perfect balance between amusement and serious work.

Teamwork 🙂

We learned a lot about how to structure our presentation, how to create a good mental map, which kinds of techniques can we use to present our story to the audience. We learned how to use different colours, shapes, markers effectively and we also got a lot of information about the quality applications/ programs and books that we can use in our work.

After the first two days, which were more or less introduction to the topic, we were obliged to use the learned methods more by ourselves. For the last day, we needed to create our piece of art, a poster or computer presentation in which we included all the stuff we have previously learned. Then we presented them to each other, divided into 2 groups, showing which techniques we were using and how we wanted to affect the audience. After every presentation time was given for constructive comments and reflexion.

Sven representing Croatia on the Intercultural evening
Ukranian participants in traditional outfit

To conclude, TC in Vilnius was a place from which we will all bring our own unique experiences, happy for the possibility to meet a lot of interesting and worthy people and to get some really good tools and knowledge for future work.

Written by: Sven Kezele
Photos by: Serj Borlak

Training Course “Make it Visual!”

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