Read more about DofE Buddy's journey.
The school signs up for the buddy program through a simple online form and has the person in charge trained - a mentor/leader/teacher to supervise, motivate and facilitate the buddies in the first phase.
In the first phase, the mentor creates a team of Czech "buddies" from pupils and students of the schoolwho will help him reach out to Ukrainian students as part of his volunteer activities. The project's young ambassadors will also help with reaching out to Ukrainian students. They will be selected from among Ukrainians and Ukrainians already studying in the Czech Republic, who will also help to overcome the language barrier on both sides. Building trust in the project is a key parameter for success.
The buddies will be given the task to prepare the content of the first 8 meetings with Ukrainian students. Afterwards, the first interactive workshop will take place, where Ukrainian students and Czech Buddhists will be present. The mentor/lead teacher will be given a series of familiarisation activities to be found in the manual. His/her task will be to carefully observe the dynamics of the group and design Czech student-Ukrainian student pairs accordingly, if they have not already organically formed themselves within the school. The mentor will continuously monitor that the pairs always meet after a week and reflect on the communication and the shift in activities, in which the project ambassadors will also help. The Czech buddy will record all activities with the Ukrainian student in the ORB online application, where the mentor will monitor the activities and progress. The mentor will meet with each of the pair separately after 3 meetings to get feedback from the participants.
In the next phase, once the Ukrainian student has stabilized in the unfamiliar environment, they will embark together on activities in the areas of movement, skills, volunteering and expedition. They will help each other together with the mentor/leader to choose activities they can do in the locality. Ideally they will find an intersection between activities so that there is at least one or two activities that they can do together. For example, a Czech student goes running regularly as part of a physical activity, so they start running together, even though their goals (running time; length of run, etc.) may differ. Another example of interconnected activities is that the Ukrainian student will be learning Czech, so he/she will choose Czech as a skill. His Czech buddy can help him with this by volunteering as a tutor.
Through this connection, a full-fledged friendship begins to form between the pair. They will spend time together in a meaningful way and enrich each other culturally.
Sign up using this form:
https://forms.gle/5xrAxrwA4qTrLFF76
If you need more information about the project, please contact the project coordinator Nadia:
Naděžda Vránová
+420 720 548 828 | nadezda.vranova@dofe.cz
