Since my university years I was quite often involved in EU projects, as I saw in this opportunity to learn something completely out of my circe of interests, travel and meet people who are sharing my values and interests within this community. As in those projects there is always NGOs involved, by talking with my mentors and not just seeing, but feeling how important their work is, I got a strong interest and desire to work one day in NGO, and very spontangeously during mentoring session by finishing one of my projects, get to know about EYE program. This was one of the easiest decisions in my life. I just discovered program, searched everything about it online, wrote business plan, found a host and headed straight to Belgium! My goal was not just work in this field, but accumulate knowledge and see how this field is actually functioning in order to open my own organisation in the future.
My host is trully insiring figure for me, with 20 years experience in the field, with every step I was filling that she knows for sure what and how she is doing, and extremely supportive person! I was managing so many different projects at the same time, some of them with 2+ years timelines and doing a lot of interesting tasks around them. For some projects I was traveling abroad for in-person meetings with executive team. My journey in organisation started from visit to European Comission! How cool is that! I also had a chance to facilitate youth exchanges, and feel that this experience boost my personal growth a lot.
I feel like most of my original goals are fullfield, and I made much more contacts withing the field than I expected. As right now organisations are submitting project proposals to portal and our organisation involved in this process as well I noticed that there was no problem for me to find partners for proposal, even if someone was refusing, replacement was found immidiately, because I had a chance to get to know so many cool people withing the field! As for the skills I improved my communication skills a lot, and not by just writing nice emails, but to actually get from people results, which is often happens in NGO work, as we work with young people who sometimes have different expectations about youth work. I also gained a lot of conficence in public speach. And most unexpected for me: was designing and running activities during some projects.
I would like this program to be a bit longer as the adventures just started to escalate and now it’s the end. I am trully grateful for my host and for all her collegues and friends that I had chance to get to know and to learn from them!