Last week ICDI’s Mathijs Euwema and Simona Giancola gave a training on the topic of child participation to 10 members of the team of De Vrolijkheid (Happiness in English), who run the Nest Centre and its activities in the refugee centre in Drachten – NL.
Child participation is an important part of the Nest approach. Ensuring that children’s opinions are heard and used is not only a fundamental right, it also contributes to their psychosocial development and well-being. And it is fun!
Applied to the daily work of De Vrolijkheid, this means to consciously choose to involve children in different degrees of decision making-organization-ownership of the creative activities happening in the Nest Centre. These activities range at the moment from music to cooking, theather, dance, art and much more.
The training was very fruitful, and all participants were highly motivated to explore theory and practice of child participation. Together they reflected on, discussed and practiced new ways to enhance child participation in the activities of the centre; and made action plans for implementing what they have learnt within the next few months.
We ended the day with music, great energy and with compliments to the ICDI trainers for the effective and participative methods used.
