Lessons learned

WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?
The project applied under Erasmus+ KA2.
Lessons learned paper (Findings and Recommendations)
The purposes of this paper would be to help partners and interested parties working in the field of non formal education in their efforts to support youth service and to undertake sensitive work with youth with fewer opportunities, while at the same collect evidence on the applicability of the FTG methodology.
In particular, the paper will assess the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and try to identify and demonstrate results, impact and sustainability of project activities. Furthermore, it will help to identify specific lessons for how organizations/institutions and staff can improve their approaches to provide more targeted and effective assistance in gender reading programmes.
The output is expected to be useful in terms of highlighting lessons and suggesting on HOW TO. In addition, the findings will be useful for partners involved in developing the technique and to improve the final version of the T-kit.
The team expected the reports on testing of the method to be broad enough to both fully test the FTG methodology and to be of value to a range of organizations/institutions and/or youth workers in Europe.
But the team recognised to some extent that demands of testing the technique for use in a range of providing meaningful instructions for youth workers and facilitators on the ground was on the low level and tried to improve the instruction for those who attempting to improve their work and activities with introduction of this method.
Kick off meeting was a valuable step in the process because it allowed the whole team to meet and develop a shared understanding of the task and work on an agreed approach.
Risks
During the Kick off meeting a set of risks were listed and mitigation measures proposed.
List of risks Mitigation measures
Poor participation of local youth (final beneficiaries)
Well-developed FTG methodology
Sustainability of the project
Building bridges with interested stakeholders / strong promotion & dissemination of results
Personal level of engagement of participants on youth exchanges
Announcement on time + High motivation as criteria
Bad communication canals
Intercultural conflict
Sending reminding 3 days before+ respect of deadline by team
Preparation of participants in advance
Misunderstanding the tasks
Simple explanation with images and text
Not well-developed technique
High motivation of participants and partners + identification of skills of participants of TC
Political situation in Serbia
Mediation and negotiation
During the training course participants developed the idea of FTG methodology technique and during and after the TC they wrote ideas how FTG methodology can be used for testing phase in both local and international context.
The limited sample for testing and making report paper was generally supportive to the evaluation. Views, analysis and contextual information of those who performed the testing were valuable. Published material produced by the project team was based on findings of those who performed the testing.
TEAM evaluation criteria
A change to the scope of the work was made during Skype meeting before the youth exchange: this was to concentrate the evaluation on only four of the six evaluation criteria, i.e. relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and coordination. Impact and sustainability were given less attention. Evidence for impact and sustainability were found to be very limited given the relatively short time frame of most activities and the lack of surveys. Relevance was explored during the writing process and all the
findings were appropriate like in project proposal. Team made a precise plan of spending money to be followed. All partners with experience were chosen to host activities and because of that project was implemented inside the planned costs.
Theories of Change
Interest was placed (17% of those who performed testing) on assessing different theories of change in the sample of FTG methodology technique. The team checked deeply all possible theories, and what team considered useful and reasonable put into the T-kit. The results of testing perhaps yielded as it had been expected. The finding that the explanation of technique in steps in the T-Kit was good developed the team found very important and they work further on text to even better explain FTG methodology in detail and they consult people without any information about the project to read and interpret. Because if users do not understand they will be disappointed and it will reflect the poor level of using, it may also reflect the lack of time the team had to unravel more carefully how to involve this technique into a plausible and complete program. Perhaps studying a simple sample in a more thorough manner would be preferable in future introduction and testing of this kind.
Potential Impact
In terms of the possible impact of the method proposed, team concluded that this will be in the medium category as the field work was limited mainly to partners with a limited number of testing and people involved into dissemination process.
The impact of the T-Kit is another question, and this depends on the final content and how it is disseminated. The handling of the T-Kit is therefore something what partners will do inside and after the project.
Conclusion
A key concern of team was whether the evaluation was compromised too much by not consulting with enough youth workers – so that the sample would too limited to be of value in testing the method.
Our opinion is that hopefully all reports taken together provided a broad set of tested experiences to be useful to improving the FTG methodology technique.
But the testing and evaluations in report papers do represent in the end a varied and certainly rich set of opinions and approaches included in the T-kit.
Lessons:
1. Project like this one is vital to sensitise youth workers, youth associations and centres, as well as the potential stakeholders, and to refine the Gender oriented programmes to make them as useful as possible and above all to negotiate a process in which good practices will be discussed, adapted and implemented in the work.
2. In a team established it was discussed what can be expected from this evaluation process and the team concluded: availability of evidence and usability of the findings.
3. Conducting an evaluation will require patience and determination to complete.
4. Flexibility with the FTG methodology technique is necessary in order to allow it to be adapted to needs of youth services who may have interest in obtaining useful lessons for future work on this issue.
5ixed signals: on the one hand at a technical level there may be interest in building expertise, but this can be outweighed by strong conflict of interest and institution sensitivities over needs.
6. Experts, opinion makers and stakeholders can provide valuable opinions and analysis.
7. Having access to resources inside grants to most NGOs limit the range of evaluation evidence about use and improvements of the method. This may be an unrealistic goal that each partner involved in the project provide valuable lessons within possibilities and constraints in one year period.
8. Evaluation should be carefully reviewed by each partner association, and should be conducted in a careful and honest manner by project team.
9. Participating the activity hosted by some organization/institution or ministry can provide valuable connections, guidance and reference material.
10. A mixed team of evaluators with complementary skills can provide a balanced team that leads to a more deep evaluation analysis