Dates: 5th August – 16th August2024
12 nights/days – 10 days program – 2 days for traveling.
Venue: Dolni Rakovets village, 50 km from Sofia, Bulgaria

The place of accomodation and activities: House for Personal development “Home OM"

The house for Personal development Home OMis a retreat house for organizing events for informal education, physical and spiritual development. In calm and relax atmosphere of village villa, the participants could feel like in home and get closer for group dynamic, interaction and peer to peer education. The house has all necessary facilities for enjoyable stay of group of 20 persons 7 bedrooms (double, triple and quadruple), 4 shared bathrooms, common kitchen and daily room, big terrace, 48 m2 training hall, green yard with sport facilities, fireplace, swimming pool and own garden with fresh vegetables. In the house and in the village have a mineral spring water. 
During the program participants will have fresh home made food and could participate in the preparation and to learn some traditional recipes. Evenings are long and funny around the fireplace. Next to the house there is a charming forest with spring water and beautiful trails and views.

Objectives: The purpose of this activity is to solve one of the main problems of young people with intellectual disabilities - their insufficient active involvement in work and not enough opportunities for professional realization. In Europe, there are more and more successful models and good practices for the active labor inclusion of young people with autism, Down syndrome, mild and moderate mental retardation and other difficulties. Feedback from employers is that these individuals are often more motivated and efficient workers. We are looking together on the base of real interaction and experience to exchange and develop sustainable models of informal education for such young people, by motivating them and giving support for development self-awareness and key competences for work inclusion. 

We aim to transfer and apply good patterns and practices through the educational mobility of young people with difficulties, youth workers, and young volunteers. The goal is to use informal and innovative training methods based on peer to peer interaction, practical exercise and real work experience to develop skills, attitude and motivation for joint work activities with intellectually disabled youth.
In the youth exchange program will participate 16 participants from 4 European countries they actively will communicate and learn for better work inclusion.

In the project participate 12 youth participants (age 18 – 30) with experience or motivation to work for social and work inclusion of intellectually disabled youth and 4 young persons with intellectual disabilities (age 13 - 30) from host country Bulgaria, Turkey, Lithuania and Croatia. 

*** Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them ***