Bolsas Leonardo da Vinci - projecto Fast Forward

O Projecto Fast Foward apresentado pela Associação Spin no âmbito da Acção Leonardo da Vinci do Programa de Aprendizagem ao Longo da Vida, foi aprovado!

Esta acção Leonardo da Vinci, através da oferta de oportunidades de mobilidade laboral a nível internacional, fomenta a integração de Pessoas no Mercado de Trabalho – nomeadamente de jovens-adultos desempregados.

O Projecto Fast Foward consiste em 17 bolsas de estágios internacionais com a duração de 12 semanas em 6 países diferentes: Alemanha, Espanha, França, Irlanda do Norte, Itália e Turquia.

Oferecemos bolsas de trabalho em várias áreas, como sendo: Tecnologias da Comunicação e Informação (TIC), Engenharias, Ambiente, Ecologia, Comunicação, Serviços Sociais, Empreendedorismo, Integração Social, Gestão de ONGs, e outras semelhantes.

Os principais requisitos para participar são:

- Ter entre 18-35 anos,

- Ter no mínimo o 9º ano de escolaridade completo (sem limite máximo de escolaridade),

- Estar actualmente desempregado;

- Ter muita VONTADE de participar!

Se estás interessado e preenches estes requisitos, inscreve-te já!

Para te inscreveres, envia-nos o teu Europass CV em inglês (ou na língua local do país onde estás interessado em fazer o teu estágio) e uma carta de apresentação/motivação – em que podes dizer-nos porque és a pessoa indicada para este projecto, porque gostarias de fazer um estágio internacional e ainda explicar a tua paixão por uma determinada área de trabalho e porque gostarias de trabalhar nela.

O prazo de candidatura é 1 de Agosto!

Para mais informações e inscrições, contacta-nos para: spin.pt@gmail.com, 914519264, ou 217 145 520.

Curso de formação sobre Educação para a Sustentabilidade - Sicilia, 8 a 15 Setembro

Estão abertas as inscrições para o curso de formação Educação para a Sustentabilidade, que vai ter lugar de 8 a 15 de Setembro em Palermo, na Sicilia, Itália! Não percam tempo e inscrevam-se já!

O curso de formação tem os seguintes objectivos:

1. Debater os principais problemas ambientais e aumentat a consciencialização acerca dos novos desafios locais
2. Analisar as relações entre os direitos humanos e o crescimento sustentável
3. Promover a cidadania activa dos jovens e encorajar o seu papel activo na criação de uma sociedade sustentável
4. Trocar experiências e boas práticas no que se refere à educação para a sustentabilidade
5. Ganhar novas competências e explorar a metodologia de educação não formal como uma ferramenta para a educação em desenvolvimento sustentável
6. Aumentar  a efectividade de projectos educativos e ambientais para/com os jovens

O método de trabalho primordial será a educação não formal, nomeadamente através de role playing, trabalho em grupo, discussões interactivas, workshops, entre outros. Alguns conceitos-chave serão transmitidos através de breves apresentações teóricas.

Os países participantes serão: Itália, Espanha, Bulgária, Suécia, Portugal, Reino Unido e Turquia.

Os participantes deviam ser preferencialmente:

•  Jovens com experiência em educação ambiental e sustentabilidade ou jovens na área da juventude com interesse por este tema.
• Com idade inferior a 30 anos
• Com a capacidade de comunicar em inglês

Devem enviar as candidaturas até 1 de Agosto! Não percam esta oportunidade única!

Para mais informações, contactar: intercambios.spin@gmail.com, 217145520, 914519264

Democracia e Participação: "Can I ask you something?"

“Can I ask you something?”/ ”Posso fazer uma pergunta?” é um projecto internacional e inter-geracional que tem como principal temática a Democracia e Participação activa na sociedade. No próximo dia 4 de Julho entre as 14h e as 19h, vamos realizar uma nova sessão de entrevistas a jovens e idosos. Não percas esta oportunidade! 

Este projecto envolve parceiros de Itália e de Portugal que têm como pano de fundo comum o dia 25 de Abril como o dia de liberdade.

Tanto jovens como idosos Italianos e Portugueses são convidados a partilhar o que entendem por “democracia” e por “participação” e de que forma estes conceitos e práticas fazem parte do seu dia-a-dia e da sociedade em geral, tal como a presença da ‘sombra’ da ditadura que ambos os países viveram.

O produto final será o resultado dessas partilhas e actividades materializado num vídeo com todas as entrevistas efectuadas.

São três os principais objectivos desta actividade internacional:

·         Promoção e o estímulo da participação activa dos jovens na vida democrática, envolvendo os idosos como uma fonte de conhecimento/sabedoria viável para as novas gerações;

·         Alargamento de possibilidades de sociabilização e de convívio inter-geracional tendo a democracia como principal tema;

·         Oferta da oportunidade aos jovens de comparar/confrontar a sua situação com a de jovens provenientes de outros países europeus no que concerne a estas temáticas.

Este projecto irá desenvolver-se em várias fases:

1.   Registo em vídeo de entrevistas a jovens e idosos portugueses seleccionados para conhecer a sua percepção de Democracia e de Participação tal como a forma como a praticam;

2.   Acolhimento de alguns jovens participantes italianos em Portugal para uma troca de ideias e resultados das entrevistas;

3.   Encontro entre os jovens dos dois países em Itália para uma reflexão conjunta sobre a democracia e como esta é encarada em ambos os países.

Não percas a oportunidade de participar neste projecto e contribuir para a democracia em Portugal e no Mundo! Posso fazer uma pergunta?!

Para mais informações e inscrições, contactar: intercambios.spin@gmail.com, 914519264, 217145520. 

Projecto com o apoio logístico de: 

1η εβδομάδα EVS! - Kyriakos (Grécia)

1 week in Lisbon! 1 week of EVS! How could somebody keep it short when they have to deal with those two issues? Well, I will try, although I warn you that I am not known as the least speaking person on the globe ;)

Since the first day I felt quite welcome in a city I already knew since before! Meeting in the airport my future “boss” made me feel like a VIP since Raquel was waiting for me holding a label so as to recognize each other on the arrival’s hall! After she accompanied me to my new home I was about to deal with what was my only worry about that new chapter of my life: the interior room! Surprisingly enough I liked it and I consider that if there wasn’t the window issue it would have been the best room ever. Some days later I realized that interior rooms are something common in Lisbon, so I slowly began getting used to the idea, without this meaning that I like the idea! ;) 

Once the “working week” began another joyful story came along! Meeting again with old friends! I got so happy meeting again with Sara and Rasa, whose names I think they are so close not by a coincidence but because they fit each other sooo much since they are both passionate, joyful and… anyway I will not go on using more adjectives cause the list would be extremely long! Sara has just returned from Nepal1, missing the yaks over there but appreciating the fact she will have electricity 24/7 here, and she is about to be our tutor! Hmmm… that means no fun with her and that’s why Marta has undertaken the entertainment part as our mentor!  Rasa on the other hand is our sweet colleague, workaholic sometimes, and although colleagues are equal to each other she could turn to be more equal than us ;D Time will show…!

And now I will have to refer a bit to the new comers in my life!! First of all Marietta! She is going to be my really-equal colleague and I thank her in advance for that! I think we will have a good time together and I appreciate the fact that she is quite pleasant! Marta is our great, hyperactive, mentor who, according to Rasa, has somehow fallen from the sky!2 She showed us really many things around Carnide and asked us about our interests so as to facilitate our life here and make us be part of the city! Actually it’s incredible how much info she has provided us! So many that we will need to stay for a life3 here to follow all these! Last but not the least, Nenad! He is so pleasant guy and we are neighbors not only in Lisbon but in terms of our countries as well! Although he is done with his EVS in Spin he passed by to show us a bit about DIC4 and till we were done my brain was about to explode by all those media we will have to get used to use! :D

The first week in the office was a preparatory one and hence easy going. My expectations about the following 9 months matched pretty much the expectations of the others so I think we will have a nice, productive and joyful time!

As it concerns the city what may I tell? I just LOVE Lisbon. I feel blessed being here and I am so grateful to Spin for accepting me! However I want to mention just some facts, positive and negative, which I have spotted in the city during this first week:

- No windows at home, no windows at the office, taking the metro to go to the job! I think that in the end the luck of light and fresh air will make me move from Spin to the next-door association related to the mentally disordered people!! :p

- I didn’t really like the fact that I had to really insist in using my ID card for bureaucratic processes like for obtaining a tax number. The same happened in the bank but in that case I decided to draw back out of respect to the personality of the employee. The argument that there is no expiry date on my ID isn’t serious because, since within EU all National IDs are equally valid, everybody will have to accept these the way they are… I was lucky enough having a passport with me although you don’t need having passport within European Union. A rhetoric question is “What if I didn’t have passport”???!

- I feel sad by the fact that, as I have been informed, there is no real recycling in the city since even if you manage to find a recycle bin people throw garbage in there, whereas even if the bins are not dirty there is no recycle in the factories. Unfortunately the same story is happening in some cases in Greece as well. I just hope that information isn’t accurate. Anyway, either if it is true or not, I still cannot recycle since there are no recycle bins nearby my place. And I feel really uncomfortable about this…

- You can see that the people live difficult times here. And I don’t mean this just by the fact that the prices seem to me more expensive compared to my last visit in the city. The most important is that I all the time see homeless people in the streets. Probably they are less than those in the streets of Athens but this doesn’t make me feel better. Although Lisbon is my shiny city those people show me a reality that exists not only here but also back home. And although in Greece the people are protesting and struggling for their lives I know that this doesn’t happen so much in Portugal. I know that probably it’s because of the long dictatorship but knowing the reason doesn’t mean anything if you don’t try to change the result. Since I am coming from a period where I was actively trying to deal against the problem in Greece I would love to see something like that happening in Lisbon and in Portugal as well…

- Although Intendente is supposed to be dangerous I was walking in there last night (and I mean really in the night!) and I was feeling extremely safe! Of course I have done the same in the past in Rua Maria Pia although the difference is that at that time I didn’t know that this is an infamous area. Anyway I feel quite safe in Lisbon and that’s the important!!

Among that first week’s most joyful experiences have been:

- Meeting with Sarinha and Rasinha after so long!

- Rasa’s meeting with Marta in Spin’s office and both of them dancing Zumba :D By the way I consider Zumba a hilarious name!!

- Sara’s croissant com queijo e manteiga, the incredible amount of associations existing in the “Bairro de  Horta Nova” and the cordial welcoming I received by the people in the association next door to Spin! How can I forget the warm hug one of those people gave me once he heard that I am “Griego”? And he wasn’t the only one of them behaving like that after listening I am Greek. I can remember 3 stories but I think that the previous is enough!

- The great, funny and joyful gentleman serving us during the opening of our bank accounts in Banco Espirito Santo (On my previous visits in Lisbon I was making fun of that bank but I think that now universe decided to make fun of me by forcing me to cooperate with it :D )

- The walk around Carnide with Marta showing us both the place as well as the facilities provided by the municipality! I was actually shocked by seeing how active that municipality is!

- The croissants we had with Marta and Marietta

- The cherries we were given in Vodafone

-  Discovering that more people than those you were expecting are living in Lisbon!

- The fact that I am gonna watch Football’s European Championship in Portugal! It reminds me the glorious days of 2004!! :D

- The guy in the supermarket asking me to let him pass in front of me because he had just 1 item and him saying to me “Obrigadinha” on my acceptance! It wasn’t just the word I liked but also the sweetness in which this guy said it - The politeness of a public bus driver on the route from Alges to Belem last Wednesday night, not just to me but to every single passenger getting in or out the bus.

- The Portuguese army staff showing me on Thursday how a helicopter and a personnel-carrying vehicle work during an exhibition of Portuguese armed forces in the Parque Eduardo VII for the celebration of the day of Portugal! I hate guns and armies but the surprising was that those guys were speaking fluent English whereas the people working in the Greek army cannot even speak proper Greek :D

As the days are passing by I am trying to get used to the idea that a dream has come true! That I have returned to my beloved Lisbon for living here! And reality has outmatched the dream since I have the opportunity of being surrounded by wonderful people and doing something I like. I know that time flies and that the 9 months will pass very soon but I am willing to cease the days and get as much as possible out of this experience. A viagem já começou…

Primeira semana em Lisboa - Marietta (Húngria)

I arrived to Lisbon on a sunny Friday afternoon. Raquel came to pick me up at the airport and for that I'm really grateful to her. Especially that she had to hurry to the airport right after work, so thank you Raquel!

The first thing I noticed about Lisbon were those beautiful purple trees called jacarandas. I wanted to see flowering jacaranda trees for a very long time and I didn't know that Lisbon's streets were filled with them, so it was a really great surprise. It is a silly notion, but it felt like Lisbon was welcoming me. :)

Lisbon is a beautiful historical city and it is very easy to fall in love with it. Sometimes I find myself wandering the streets completely enchanted by the loveliness and the atmosphere of the city. At these times I find it hard to believe that I will have 9 months to enjoy all that Lisbon has to offer. Its charming old houses, its green parks, its interesting culture, its great atmosphere and its hospitable people all make Lisbon an incredibly captivating and extraordinary place.

I also enjoy spending time at the office. Sara and Rasa make us feel very welcome and they take a good care of their volunteers, helping us with any issues we have, from opening a bank account to resolving problems with the telephone company. The projects of Spin are all very interesting. We are still in the training period, but I believe I'm going to enjoy working for Spin a lot.
We also got an admirable mentor, Marta, who showed us around in the neighborhood and helps us to integrate to the city.

All in all, I am really happy to be here and cannot wait to find out what new experiences await me in this wonderful city.

Can I ask you something?... Posso perguntar-te uma coisa?...

“Can I ask you something?” - ”Posso fazer uma pergunta?” é um projecto internacional e inter-geracional que tem como principal temática a Democracia e Participação activa na sociedade.

Este projecto envolve parceiros de Itália e de Portugal que têm como pano de fundo comum o dia 25 de Abril como o dia de liberdade.

Tanto jovens como idosos Italianos e Portugueses são convidados a partilhar o que entendem por “democracia” e por “participação” e de que forma estes conceitos e práticas fazem parte do seu dia-a-dia e da sociedade em geral, tal como a presença da ‘sombra’ da ditadura que ambos os países viveram. O produto final será o resultado dessas partilhas e actividades materializado num vídeo com todas as entrevistas efectuadas.

São três os principais objectivos desta actividade internacional:
•    Promoção e o estímulo da participação activa dos jovens na vida democrática, envolvendo os idosos como uma fonte de conhecimento/sabedoria viável para as novas gerações;
•    Alargamento de possibilidades de sociabilização e de convívio inter-geracional tendo a democracia como principal tema;
•    Oferta da oportunidade aos jovens de comparar/confrontar a sua situação com a de jovens provenientes de outros países europeus no que concerne a estas temáticas.

Este projecto irá desenvolver-se em várias fases:
1.    Registo em vídeo de entrevistas a jovens e idosos portugueses seleccionados para conhecer a sua percepção de Democracia e de Participação tal como a forma como a praticam;
2.    Acolhimento de alguns jovens participantes italianos em Portugal para uma troca de ideias e resultados das entrevistas;
3.    Encontro entre os jovens dos dois países em Itália para uma reflexão conjunta sobre a democracia e como esta é encarada em ambos os países.

Não percas a oportunidade de participar neste projecto e contribuir para a democracia em Portugal e no Mundo! Posso fazer uma pergunta?!

Para mais informações e inscrições, contactar: intercambios.spin@gmail.com, 914519264, 217145520.

ECOyoung

In the midsts of spring this year, 20 young Europeans came to the most western city within their borders in an attempt to acquire new and share old knowledge of the life of nature in today's world, its destruction and preservation.

Doing so, they perhaps discovered more of themselves and others as well. I dare to say so because the ecological crises is obviously provoked by humans and not by nature itself, so the problems of ecology has mainly anthropological character. Therefore, I believe, solutions for these issues should be searched for within personalities and their crisis in relation to themselves and nature as a constitutional part of their being.

If we take a peek at the etymology of ecology, it reveals it self not only as a study of living things and environment, but also as a relationship between the two. Or similar, Okologie derived from the Greek oikos, has a meaning of a house, habitation. So here, as the name of this youth exchange ECO young suggests, the idea of such a gathering was that participant's views on the environment they inhabit grow younger, are renewed, refreshed, regenerated and even reconstructed, so that, with a certain change that hopefully will occur in their relation to it,  the world, the nature itself could become young and new. Eco young, at least for me, is the return of the regenerating power that nature lost because of the human dominant rule over it, and so the return to being eternally young and forever new. Perhaps this romantic view on the preservation of nature was more actual in 17 and 18 century when ideas of environmental protection were given a start, more of an aesthetic preservation than anything else. So, we agree that these ideas are not new at all. The difference is that today, and this exchange helped us reconsider and remember, people are aware of their own self-destructive power which is the result of the instrumentalisation of science in service of human life stile and the realization of the modernism's program of ruling over nature. Aesthetics is no longer the case.

Different debates during this green week provoked many discussions and reflections, and the individual contribution of participants sharing their own views were highly productive for it showed the group how various are the standing points depending of the cultural, historical, political and economic backgrounds that influence how others perceive and treat their environment. To make things clearer, several field activities were performed where persons involved in this exchange had opportunity to "RE" a lot, that is to REmake, REmix, REdistribute and in this way to REfresh their consciousness of our surroundings, whether this be urban or not. I think these young people recalled that environmentalism is not exclusively far in the hills, mountains and seas, but also in our houses, streets and cities. Ecology is also defined as “The study of consequence.” (Frank Herbert), so humans being the only beings to consciously act they provoke changes that produce consequences that we are used to ignore as abstract and far from us, and therefore not worthy to deal with any time soon.

This postponing of our responsibility towards nature led us to a point where making damage is inevitable. Not only that it prevents environment in its natural cycle of regeneration, but it somehow, ironically, became a part of this cycle. Human impact is now needed, otherwise nature becomes overprotective and its destructive powers are manifested in ways we are about to witness.

Many of the workshops of this youth exchange made clear that the abstract "raising awareness" is not always the answer in making changes. I would rather say that it is more helpful not doing than doing if we wish to aid nature to get back on its track. It is choosing the smaller evil and researching for alternatives of how to reduce damage that we are making anyways. Honestly speaking this is the best we could do in my opinion. Fooling ourselves with over excessive involvement and environmental activism (which is becoming more of a trendy fashion than realistic engagement) is simply not doing the trick if we wish to take things seriously. It is good for entertaining the masses and feeding the society of banalised spectacles. We should accept our weakness and inability in making things better, and understand that sometimes nature's message is "please stay away".

I truly hope that ECO young helped us see that the human emancipation with the help of growing sciences perhaps sometimes went in wrong ways: instead of liberating and developing it led to a form of enslavement.

In my subjective opinion, and from my humble knowledge in this field I dare to conclude that our mistake is in nurturing our instinct of power over things and this is where we go against ourselves. I believe that it is not in the human nature to own things, but instead, we should attempt to enter in a dialog with them, if we wish to understand them better of course.

Tristão Garrido Lopes Faria