symbolwork Archive - ... moves mountains

EJO4Youth

Effective Job Orientation for Youth

The EJO4Youth projects aims to improve job orientation for young people in Europe by providing youth workers and professionals with training and methodologies based on the Symbolwork approach. Thus, the project fosters the competences of youth workers to apply effective, motivating and impactful job orientation with interactive and engaging methods and practices.

The project’s primary objective is to help young people from disadvantaged backgrounds improve their vocational and professional skills by using a career counselling methodology based on Symbol Work. Various interventions will be implemented in order to assist young people in “designing” a roadmap for their career and educational paths. Moreover, young people will receive assistance that is relevant not only to the labour market, but also to increasing social inclusion and active citizenship, as well as reducing discrimination and obstacles in their lives.

Our main results are:

Blended Learning Approach and Accreditation: These guidelines will provide more information on the requirements and competences necessary for the implementation of the Symbol Work approach as well as on differences between participating countries.
Face-to-face Training Curriculum and Toolset: This curriculum includes more information on how to implement the Symbol Work approach and job orientation. The training is focused on improving the skills and competences of youth workers in Europe.
Distance Learning Course: Transferring the curriculum into an online format, allowing for professionals without direct access to the face-to-face training to improve their skills and competences online in an easy and user-friendly way.

Project duration

May 2022 till April 2024

Web

Website: www.ejo4youth.eu

Project Partners

Düzce Provincial Administration (Turkiye)
Consultoría de Innovación Social (Spain)
Hafelekar Unternehmensberatung (Austria)
Compass GmbH (Austria)
Rogers Foundation for Person-Centred Education (Hungary)

Co-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 Turkish National Agency. Neither the European Union nor Turkish National Agency can be held responsible for them.

psychological symbol work

Our article on psychological symbol work was published in the current issue of the German Journal for Alternative Practitioners:

Psychological symbol work.
Giving people language through symbols when words fail them
Article in DHZ Praxis 08/2022

You can download the full version of the article here:
Download

You can find other interesting documents on our website under Resources – Symbol work

KITE Fighters

Kids and Teachers Fighting for Inclusion

The aim of the project is to assist pedagogues working with young people, with a focus on diversities, to strengthen social inclusion, and promote peer-to-peer communication and team building.

Innovative methods and tools for teachers and students will be developed to prevent bullying situations and the escalation of conflicts at school:

Equip teachers with tools to enhance their capability to support students, promoting their mental health and emotional intelligence development.
Enable teachers to use creative and innovative methodologies as symbol work, storytelling, folk tales and other non-formal education approaches.
Support schools to tackle early school leaving (ESL) and disadvantage and to offer quality education, enabling success for all students.
The main overall objective is to strengthen social inclusion skills of kids and teachers.

Aims & Objectives

Development of the “KITE-FIGHTER TOOLKIT”: a collection of different tools, games and exercises, which teachers can use. It will include storytelling, symbol work and folk tales exercises
Elaboration of a CURRICULUM and TRAINER’S GUIDE for a teacher training, to empower teachers to use the Kite-fighter toolkit techniques, and develop new professional and socio-emotional skills
Organization of MULTIPLIER EVENTS and ACTIVITIES as well as delivering a set of MINI-TRAINING EVENTS to empower local teachers and youth workers to use the KITE-fighter toolkit.

Project duration

September 2019 till April 2022

Web

Homepage: www.kitefighters.eu
Facebook: www.facebook.com/KITEfightersproject

Project Partners

Rogers Foundation for Person-Centred Education (Hungary) – Coordination
ACTIVE CITIZENS PARTNERSHIP (Greece)
CESIE (Italy)
Hafelekar Unternehmensberatung (Austria)

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

SymfoS – YC

SymfoS for Youthcare

“SymfoS for Youth Care” develops an innovative counseling method based on the approach of symbol work. Its implementation in the youth care system would significantly improve the integration chances of disadvantaged young people (NEETS) in Europe. Due to a lack of integration in many areas of life, they are increasingly excluded from participation in society.

With the methodical approach of symbol work (developed by Wilfried Schneider) as an innovative counselling tool, the project aims to enable young people in youth welfare to effectively support disadvantaged young people. Innovative features are on the one hand the transfer of the previous method from vocational guidance to the youth welfare system in each partner country and on the other hand the extension of the SymfoS educational approach with web courses for initial training (Higher Education) at universities (Social Care).

In youth welfare, working with symbols offers young people an additional, universal language. In short, symbolic work means getting a person to reach out to themselves. Symbols are helpful in situations that are difficult or impossible to describe with other means of communication.

Project duration

September 2018 to August 2021

Web

Homepage: www.symfos-youth.eu
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SymfoS
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/groups/8704665

Project Partners

Sozialwerk Düren (Deutschland)
Hafelekar Unternehmensberatung (Österreich)
Asociacion Caminos (Spanien)
Colegio Oficial de Ciencias Politicas y Sociologia (Spanien)
University of Gloucestershire (England)
Instituto Politecnico Do Porto (Portugal)
Associacao A3S (Portugal)

SOCS

Introducing Strategic Organisation Counseling using Symbols for Visualization

SMEs (especially social enterprises), Start-Ups or young entrepreneurs are very often low budgeted and therefore do not have the financial means to develop and install tools and trainings to further develop their business and the competencies of their teams. It is usually impossible for them to hire an external counsellor to support them in their strategical plan.

Erasmus+ Programme has set the objective of fighting unemployment through training and education: “EU businesses need to become more competitive through talent and innovation”. The project SOCS promotes building up on this goal by improving the learning provision tailored to the specific needs of SMEs, Start-ups and entrepreneurs, short people who have HR and organizational development tasks.

“Overall, demand is growing for non-routine analytical skills and strategies involving creativity, problem-solving, communication, teamwork and entrepreneurship – all skills that help workers to maintain their employability and enterprises their resilience in the face of change.”
A Skilled Workforce for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth”, A G20 Training Strategy, INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE, GENEVA, NOVEMBER 2010

By focusing on developing the strategic, leadership, teamwork and HR management competences of the SME owners, managers and their teams, SOCS project will help them build competitiveness, grow and increase employment.

The aim of the SOCS project is to improve entrepreneurial practice by improving the skills of the responsible staff, especially those in charge in small organizations by the approach of symbol work. The innovation lies in visualization as a very precious technique to create new responses instead of only dealing and being pushed by day to day business. Symbols help to express preconscious attitudes and mental barriers, even blind spots and get more clearness about future actions.

During the two years project period, partners aim to identify the areas of interventions most needed by the targets (organizational counsellors, consultants, business owners, entrepreneurs, especially young entrepreneurs, organizational and human resources managers and students, technicians for organizational development and HR decisions in organizations, start-up founders), by finding the existing tools most adequate for use, adapt them if needed or to develop new tools based on symbol work, especially for the online versions of the tools for free use.

Objectives

To develop leadership and HR skills of participants
To improve innovation management and innovation skills and adopting it as part of a day-to-day work to improve competitiveness
To improve managerial practice dealing with change and challenges
To develop self-assessment tools based on symbol work
To provide to the learners the possibility to choose between solutions for f2f training or online tools

Project duration

November 2019 till October 2021

Web

Homepage: www.socs-project.eu

Projekt Partners

Asociación Caminos (Spain)
Hafelekar Unternehmensberatung (Austria)
BIMEC (Bulgaria)
CSI Center for Social Innovation (Cyprus)
Instituto Politecnico do Porto (Portugal)

SymfoS

Symbols for Success

SymfoS – Symbols for Success project promotes an innovative education and career guidance method addressed to young disadvantaged people based on sets of symbols.

Very often the traditional counselling methods are aimed at young people who have advanced writing and reading skills and are already supported by a strong social system. These kinds of interventions can be ineffective with young people who, for various reasons, find difficulties in expressing in words their situation, their needs and their goals for the future. Working with symbols is an opportunity for them to use a universal language to do it.

SymfoS aims to support young people who encounter difficulties in finding their own pathway within the education system and labour market to set their own goals for their future. SymfoS further aims to provide educational guidance and professional operators a holistic method that improves the overall quality of counselling.

Project duration

September 2016 till February 2019

Web

Homepage: www.symfos-youth.eu
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SymfoS/

Project Partner

Hafelekar Unternehmensberatung (Austria) – Coordination
Asociacion Caminos (Spain)
BALLYMUN JOB CENTER (Ireland)
Sozialwerk Düren (Germany)
ZeMiT (Austria)
CESIE (Italy)