“So far the initiative belongs to me and thus I am attached to it like my child I want to take care of it and no one else knows better how to do it. Well, I learned that it takes a village to raise a child, so I will reconsider my power and position within the initiative to empower other people to take action.”
Lavinia has supported community development in Buzău, Romania both as a volunteer and professionally. She is particularly passionate about giving youth opportunities to connect and learn.
When she joined CA, Lavinia wanted to establish an education hub for young people. But after she saw initiatives where the community sets the agenda, she decided to create a series of workshops with youth based on their own priorities.
Lavinia worked abroad for many years in business and marketing. When she returned to her native Romania, she began volunteering at the Buzau Community Foundation and gradually joined the board, served as president of the board and then took a position in the executive team. She focused on building a team of volunteers, and engaging the community in generating ideas and finding resources for the foundation. Lavinia also launched a local podcast featuring youth and successful local adults as role models.
Buzău is a city of 100,000 people located 100 km from Bucharest, while the surrounding county of Buzău has 460,000 inhabitants. There is no university in Buzău and Lavinia has seen that many talented high school graduates leave the city to pursue education elsewhere.
Lavinia joined CA with the vision of creating an education hub for young people from different backgrounds that would offer opportunities for learning and interaction. She wanted to nurture an active youth community that would serve as an information network, benefit from skills development and generate ideas for local projects. In Buzau city the high schools are more technical oriented and young people are not interacting with each other plus there is a lack of common places to meet (like outdoor sports areas or indoor interactive places).
CA’s focus on putting the community in the driver’s seat of initiatives prompted Lavinia to rethink some aspects of her plan. She decided to start by talking to youth and various people who support youth in Buzău to better understand what local youth want and need and who is active in different groups. Drawing on the listening conversations introduced in CA, she held ten consultations, with teenagers, teachers, mothers and journalists. The idea of my project about youth is going on with talks among locals. It is a phase that I have never allocated so much time and observation around compared to my previous projects. This slow process it offers me a different perspective of how to implement projects when targets and budget are not the main focus. I must say that is healing me from an aggressive / pro-active attitude into more an inclusive and connected attitude.
During this same period, Lavinia realised the importance of working in a team. The initial plan was to grow this project on my own as the only coordinator but over the course of the project I have realised how helpful is to have a core team and work together to split tasks and share ideas. I have opened the perspective to a broader view and I have gathered 4 dedicated persons to work on the project as the core team. Diana, a life coach with a finance background, became her main project partner, providing strong support in planning and organising activities. Diana is very dedicated, committed, and she likes working with youth. I know I can count on her 100%. Having Diana let me step out of the implementation role – I facilitate the team, and she organises and leads the workshops.
Alexia, a teenager, came on board to act as a connector to youth and answer questions from youth about high school. The teenager is a key person in building the relationship with the youth as they see her close to them and it seems that they aspire to learn and be that strong and confident like she is.
Besides the 1:1 conversations within targeted people from the community, Lavinia and Diana created two online questionnaires, one addressed to youth and the second to parents. The youth questionnaire had 22 questions in 3 categories: (1) profile/personal data about the youth, (2) their interests and where they spend their spare time (3) their opinion about the youth community. The questionnaires were spread among youth by youth and teachers, and about 100 people responded. As a result of the questionnaire feedback, Lavinia and her team shifted their target youth segment from 15-18 to 12-14 years old and also decided to shift from topics they had originally envisioned to issues that youth had identified. The topics youth prioritised were related to self-esteem, public speaking, bullying, networking and eating properly.
Lavinia and her team organised an initial workshop with youth and their mothers to collect feedback about needs and expectations. They found that Parents were reluctant when it come to the idea that this is free of charge, then youth are overwhelmed with homework and have limited time for extra activities and this is crazy because for their parents this is an activity that comes after homework. Parents are a bit sceptical when it comes to let the youth be part of a community. Some of the youth are very unsocial and shy and some focused on different activities only with their dedicated groups and do not look interested into belonging to a bigger group.
Nonetheless, they found that the discussions and initial workshops had generated a circle of interested youth. Over the following months, they held four additional workshops with youth. At each workshop they addressed a different topic, including creativity and socialising through stories, artistic activities (piano & guitar) and bullying. Diana coordinated all the content for the workshops with support from Alexia. Some of the participating youth were active in helping with coordinating activities.
Outreach was challenging. Originally Lavinia had imagined that participating youth would tell their peers about the workshop series. However this was not the case: we asked them to inform their friends & colleagues and we noticed that no one came with someone new. The feedback from youth was that they do not know how to communicate about this to their friends and the friends do not understand what is happening with these activities. During a CA session with a youth engagement expert, Lavinia heard the idea of approaching young teachers to reach youth. She decided to try this route and found a young open-minded teacher who recommended 5 youth, who later joined the workshops.
The youth came up with a name for their youth community – TeenSquad Buzau. According to Lavinia, the opportunity to shape the name of the community and workshop themes helped youth gain confidence and increased their commitment. Lavinia created a Whats app group, an account on Instagram and a page on Facebook. Going forward, she wants to create content for the online accounts that the participating youth can share on their own pages and accounts. The aim is to spread the word in the community so more youth hear and get interested to attend the activities.
Lavinia also feels that the workshops gave youth a new opportunity to get to know others and the confidence to ask experts questions that they cannot ask at school or at home. They opened up during the workshops in ways they don’t on social media.
Lavinia gained a new appreciation of shared leadership. It changed my perception (my reality) about working with local communities in a way that I understood that the responsibility should be shared among people and not to stay only on my shoulders. And I learned an important lesson: to know when to let go.
She went on: My role was more as a leader as I initiated the project, the entire idea came from me and I have thought that I should stay in the leading role. Once I have seen the passion of the people and their dedication to this project and I have realised that they are doing a great job, I step back and let every person lead at a certain point – I am just now making sure things are happening. My role now is more on promoting and spreading the project within the social network and among the youth and keeping the whats app group alive and interactive.
She also saw the benefits of adapting and being open. Thanks to CA, I learned how to… update the mindset in very flexible manner and see not only one solution, see it from different angles. I learnt that is important to adapt, to infuse new ideas that are not yours and not part of the initial plan. I learnt to wait for the things to settled and not be in a hurry. I learned to let people make their own choices in regard to their implication and dedication. This validated their opinions.
The most important change was to avoid acting only based on a plan and force things to happen. I have a different approach now. It is about being flexible and resilient to everything new that can impact the initial plan of the project and looking for adaptation and integration. The result is that things are evolving naturally and have a good track so far.
Inspired by CA’s discussion of power dynamics, Lavinia recognised the ways in which youth often group themselves around the economic status of their families and tend to remain in these groups. She and Diana sought to reduce these divisions by forming mixed teams of youth that did not know one another during the workshops.
Lavinia and her team are now planning another series of monthly workshops. They would like to engage two more teenagers to share their experience with the youth, find more people who act as connectors in the community to spread the word and develop a network of open-minded teachers and specialists who can volunteer to hold workshops for youth.
They also have a long-term aim: to create a dedicated space for the youth group where they might come together around passions that they identify and share.
