A youthful spirit of volunteerism has just taken hold in Romania during 18 to 22 February with the Dreams and Teams programme bearing its first fruit. Three new groups of energetic young leaders graduated successfully after having completed their training in a chilly, but sunny Bucharest.

British Council’s Dreams and Teams programme trains young people between the ages of 14 to 18 to become young leaders in their communities. It is a flourishing project that now operates in over 40 countries and has reached an audience of over 150,000 young people.

The venue chosen for the culmination of the week long training was a sports hall in downtown Bucharest.  The bright primary colours off the Romanian tricolour festooned the hall and a platoon of Young Leaders in yellow t-shirts made clear to the younger participants how to take part. 100 lucky kids enjoyed inspiring games to test their teamwork, coordination and simple ability to catch and throw.  One Young leader was even able to teach fire dancing to all of the kids participating. Of course, without any flammable materials involved.

B.C Project Manager Oana Macovei, who organised the training week, expressed her admiration for all the trainees both young leaders and the three newly-trained tutors, “The energy of the Young Leaders and the Local Tutors really impressed me and, of course their performance during the training and festival. I was a bit worried before the festival as I didn’t know if the Young Leaders would be able to manage 100 primary school children at once. But when the young children arrived half of hour early than scheduled and the Young Leaders entertained them with freshly improvised activities I was sure they could handle it. I think the sentence that encapsulates our success was the young girl who asked us “Can I come again next week? “.

The training was delivered by the lead trainer Carol Hawman from Youth Sports trust. Anna Yanina, Local Tutor from D+T Bulgaria, took part in the training and shared with us her experience from Bulgaria. Anna Yanina will in future be help expand D and T Romania by running future training sessions and bringing Romanian Young Leaders with their Bulgarian counterparts.

Tutor Mihaela Huluta said, “Even though I have previous volunteer experience I have learnt a tremendous amount. Our trainer Carol Hawman was fantastic and we learnt lots of new techniques for developing our young leaders”. Carol added “I see a bright future for the programme and I was really impressed with how smoothly this festival went even though it was their first. They have developed strong planning skills and Young Leaders improvised brilliantly when things didn’t go to plan”.

The real challenge, however, begins now.  The three groups from Bucharest, Drobeta Turnu Severin and Sibiu finished the week by thinking about where they want the programme to go and how the disparate groups will cooperate in future. Working with disadvantaged communities as well environmental awareness campaigns are now in the pipeline.

As the session closed on Friday afternoon email addresses were being exchanged and promises to visit each other soon were made.  Overall, a very special connection and a wonderful team spirit was born and the sky’s is now the limit for these twenty talented youth and three new tutors.