During one week, 1st - 7th March, in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, took place the Group Leadership Training.

The training has been organized by AVI-Moldova in the frame of YTNF project.  It brought together 28 participants from 10 different countries who had the opportunity to gain new skills, new knowledge and new experience in the field of leadership. The training provided different kind of activities: workshops, brainstorms, reflecting groups, discussions, video and slideshow presentations.

During the activities the participants had the opportunity to know each other and the represented organisations, to exchange their views on what means to be a leader. The main topics of the training were:

• Teambuilding, during this session participants had to work in two teams in order to figure out how hard, but important is to work in a team. The "Bridge" exercise  (each team had to make a half of the bridge, and, in the end, the two parts had to match) pointed out that in a team is necessary and useful to listen other's oppinions and sometimes, make compromises.
•  Leadership and communication, motivation and conflict management. The role-play, draw exercise and a test showed that a leader will be able to succeed, having this 3 main skils - art of communication (undersanding and listening others), power of motivation (the leader has to be self-motivated, but also to know how to motivate the team) and conflict management (to solve conflicts, to reach compromises).
• Leadership Skills, the brainstorm which begun the session helped the participants to exchange their ideas about what skills a leader needs. Also, on this topic there were made working groups which had to find the answer at several questions - what should be the qualities of a leader, what should never do a leader, what is the difference between a manager and a leader.
• Presentation skills, in an interactive way, each participant had the opportunity to develop their skills by making a short presentation of a word (the participants were not prepared, they had to choose a piece of paper with a word, to make a 1 minute presentation while being recorded ;) ). Afterwords, the participants have watched the video and analysed their presentations.
• Personal Leadership Development. There have been made 4 workshops on Motivation skills, Time managements skills, Taking risk skills and Problem solving skills. The participants have chosen one of the workshop and worked on one of this topics. The workshops gave the opportunity to exchange different ideas, experiences between participants, but also to gain and improve their own skills.
• Woman Leadership session was funny, but very interesting. The participants worked in two groups and had to find the advantages/desadvantages of a woman leader. Even though there were just 6 men ;) they were really actively participating, being involved in each discussion.

In the end of the training the participants had the opportunity to give to each other ideas to help them as a leader (each participant wrote on a piece of paper advice to the others how he/she could improve his/her skills as a leader).

The training had a funny part as well. In the middle of the training the prep-team has organized sightseeing of Chisinau. This way, the participants had the opportunity to get to know the city and to interact with the Moldavian culture and people. After the sightseeing, there was organized the Moldavian evening at a specific moldavian restaurant. The particiants tasted our traditional, Moldavian food (mamaliga and placinte), which was really delicious!!! (their words)

In the last day of the training, at the International Evening the participants have presented their country. Music, dance and intercultural communication - the main words about this party ;)... and of course, fun!

The training had been runned by 2 senior trainers, Gheorghe Caraseni (Moldova) and Abel Polese (Italy) helped by 3 junior-trainers - Alina Secrieru, Carolina Secrieru and Stas Sajin (all three from Moldova). 

The prep-team: Alina Secrieru, Carolina Secrieru, Stas Sajin and the 2 trainers, Gheorghe Caraseni and Abel Polese. Special thanks to Renata  Marciuc and Cezar Cernei who helped the prep-team with the technical questions!