Manuel, 21, from Vienna participated at an Erasmus+ project for the first time… read on to see how he has experienced it 🙂

I had a great week filled with a lot of joy, interesting workshops and a lot of new experiences. Nevertheless, for me the most important aspect of the training course was meeting people from so many different countries and the cultural exchange that took place. Everyone met the challenge of expressing themselves differently from the way they were used to do it. I believe that everyone grew on this, got the chance to improve their communicative skills and observed every days life from another point of view. I wasn’t aware that different cultures bring so many different aspects with it.

I have learned how to use hand gestures to underline the things being said. This was mostly brought to us by the Italians. (on the right you can see some of them)

There was a Polish guy who used his voice very cleverly and an energetic guy from Estonia showed me the power of smiling and positive thinking. At home, I live my life more passively and I think others do it too. We don’t try to communicate well and sometimes we are not interested to even try. It is different on occasions like this training course. We see people from around Europe and all of us try to get the most out of it. Sometimes it means the most to find new ways to express ourselves and trying to understand others. This effort can and should be done in our day-to-day lifes to improve life quality.

I think, through this experience, that people should frequently meet people from other cultures to enhance their spectrum of observation and communication. This is one of the most important things I have learned at SpeakUp! and I am very grateful for that. If I would get another chance of participating in events where many cultures meet I would, like Erasmus+ projects, with no doubt, take it. I would recommend everybody to take the chance as well if they can because the experiences are and will always be unforgettable.

Youth exchanges, training courses – whaaat?! …that came up our minds when we first heard those terms. So really, what are those mysterious „youth projects“ all about?

No, parents don’t change their children for a week… but they may enjoy a week without them (or worrying about their kids being in a foreign country all alone, maybe getting lost, as ours first did…) Young people from various nations all across Europe come together for one to three weeks and work on a specific topic. Moreover, they share their cultures and build up valuable friendships.

For us all those projects were a great experience and huge opportunity to explore the world! There is so much you can learn from each other, that’s just unbelievable.

And because we got out so much of it, we decided to create our own organization. We want to give other young people the chance to get to know the world like we did.

wEUnite was founded in April 2014 by Nina-Bianca Anranter and Kerstin Ess, both students in Austria, who met each other on one of those projects and became really good friends!

Since April 2014 we took part in several projects and hosted our first one. We liked organizing our first exchange so much that we decided to write more projects… and somehow the National Agency liked our ideas, which makes us extremely happy and proud!

Within the next weeks we will host two training courses.

Are you curious what we do and who we’ll meet ? Follow our blog and like us on Facebook to stay up-to-date.