Eva Michálková

7/15/2019

Ambassadors of Love and Respect evaluation meeting

Twenty volunteers were evaluating their one-year involvement in the international project focusing on teen dating violence prevention

In the week from 8th to 11th July 2019 we were closing and evaluating project Ambassadors of Love and Respect, in which five other partner organization were involved: Georgia, Armenia, Italy, Spain, Austria, and which was coordinated by proFem.

The aim of this project was to create and assess the model of peer educators involvement in the prevention of teen dating violence and into the awareness-raising about this topic. Based on this, our volunteers in the roles of peer educators, so as someone who is closer to the target group, could be involved in the project Love and Respect.

In September 2018, selected volunteers were trained in Rustavi, Georgia. Then for almost a year, they were involved mainly in creating content for social media and organizing youth workshops.

The goal of meeting in Prague was to evaluate this one-year cooperation and receive feedback from volunteers on what was going well and what were possible barriers they faced.

We also talked about possibilities of their continuous involvement in the prevention activities and we collected ideas for manual on peer educators involvement in the prevention activities. "It is not just something to put to my CV" said one of our volunteers in her feedback, "the whole volunteering experience was very beneficial to me since my motivation was mainly to do something meaningful, not just to improve my CV".

This manual should be used by other non-profit organizations or similar projects to transfer know-how which we gain during this project and cooperation with volunteers. Therefore it should be easier for other organizations to involve peer educators. You will find this manual here on our website as soon as we finish it.

Big thanks to all volunteers for their energy, efforts and motivation. We are truly delighted that there are so many young people willing to spend their free time volunteering!