Help Children in Need to Become Leaders of Change

We continued our activities of creativity development of talented youth from rural areas. We held 14 creative workshops for more than 30 children. The topics of these workshops were: overview of creativity, development of the divergent thinking, introduction of creativity technics, identifying alternative solutions for problems, etc.

Moreover, we extended the creativity workshops to the teachers of the children involved in the project. The program aims to stimulate the creative potential of teachers and learning ways in which this potential can be used in solving creatively the many problems that keep pupils in the rural areas from going to school or having excellent results. We held workshops with teachers from Hoceni commune, Vaslui County, Romania.

The beginning of the school year allowed us to restart creativity workshops in the three communities where we implement our project. The children were excited to see us again and to be challenged to explore the depths of their imagination in order to bring to surface their brightest ideas. Since the summer vacation was long, our first meetings focused on bringing back the creative attitude for the children. This was done through a series of games and tasks children were proposed to solve. This way, we focused on the part of the creative process where one is asked to generate as many solutions as possible, no matter how realistic or usable they are. The end of the workshops focused, then, on bringing the large number of ides to several that were considered the most probable to solve the situations children was presented.

In total there have been organized more than 10 such workshops in rural communities where children have little or no access to informal education activities. In most cases, for these children, their most and only challenging environment is the school. Once they finish classes, each day, their parents can do little to encourage their curiosity and need for a stimulating surrounding. Considering all this, the level of enthusiasm in these groups is extremely high for people outside of their regular, day-to-day encounters, to come and present them activities, information and challenges that are fun, at the same time.

As the winter presents even less opportunities for children to have space to play, because of the cold and the bad weather, we intend to continue bolstering their creative abilities so that they can make the best of their limited resources in order to spend quality time in their homes but also outdoor.