Professionalizing European Youth Circuses (part 2)

The project aims to improve the quality of the youth work done in the youth circus field by educating professionals. This is doneby offering several master classes: two focusing on sharing best practices between experienced circus trainers and threebetween circus school leaders and administrative staff. All the training modules also have a strong emphasis on sharing bestpractices about social inclusion, as previous experiences show that circus is a very powerful tool that can be used for thispurpose. This aspect is shared for the wider field of youth workers along the way, and especially in the final disseminationseminar.The project is based on the idea of circus as an activity that can be used as a tool to increase the psycho-physical andsocial wellbeing of young people. Circus also improves the self-esteem and gives positive learning experiences for differentkinds of people. The project aims to develop the professionalism of the youth circus workers in order to increase the positiveeffects that can be reached through circus. There is a strong focus on giving more tools to the trainers and youth circus leadersand raise their professional self-esteem as well as increase their motivation to stay in the field and be better at organizing thecircus activities for young people from all kinds of backgrounds. There is a strong need for more well-organized circus activitiesin the youth field all around Europe as circus is an activity that can support and connect together young people from all kinds ofbackgrounds. There is a lot more young people wanting to participate in youth circus than there is possibilities for participation.This is very much due to the lack of skilled teachers and functioning youth circus organisations and the lack of knowledge in theyouth sector about the ways to involve circus as a method in youth work.The project is conducted by nine organizations. Allpartner organizations are national umbrella organizations in the youth circus field or have a similar, unofficial positionrepresenting the wider youth circus field in their country. This provides the partners with a good overview of the whole field intheir countries as well as the needs and demands that the youth circuses have. The organisations also have good networks intheir countries which means that the project results will not only stay within the participating organisations but touch a very largegroup of young people and youth organizations. Through the partners the project is closely connected to hundreds of youthcircuses, thousands of youth circus teachers and leaders/administrators and more than 100 000 young people having circus as ahobby. The project activities will be organized in five different countries. The local partner is in charge of organising the activity intheir country. During the project, an open-knowledge resource centre is created where all the learning material created duringthe project will be collected. These are disseminated to the whole youth circus field in each partner country and to the wideryouth field. The dissemination will happen also internationally through the already existing connections and networks.The projectwill gather altogether 54 participants for the administrative master classes and 36 for the pedagogical master classes. Thedissemination seminar is expected to collect 80 participants. The project steering group will meet four times during the project.Through the existing networks that the partners have in their countries and in other parts of Europe it is possible to reachthousands of people working in the field of youth circus and give them the chance to benefit from the project results. In additionto that, several national actions will be made to include a wider field of youth work in each country and give them knowledgeabout circus as a method to increase the wellbeing of young people.The project will influence the youth circus field throughtrainings that support the participants and the youth circuses where they work but also the creation of national training coursesand thus the long-term development of the youth circus field on the way of becoming more professional. As all the curricula,training materials etc. are available online as an open resource, the project benefits even actors who don't take part in theproject but who are invited to take advantage of the received results. In this way, the project is expected to have an internationalinfluence on the professionalization of the youth circus field. PEYC (part 2) will be organized in close connection to the biggerproject PEYC with the same partners and same goals and methods. Together they form a PEYC -project with 7 master-classes,a basic circus trainer course in two parts, a resource center with virtual learning materials and dissemination seminar inconnection with the wider European youth sector.