Young and talented

Background Our project is focused on the target group of disadvantaged low motivated young people – young people who come from rural regions, from Roma minority, from orphanages, from socially difficult background (broken families, poor families, families with unemployment), from families with low-motivated parents, young people in re-educative centres etc. As still this target group is vulnerable and needs special support to be able to participate fully in the life of society, we have decided to choose the priority of inclusion and diversity in non-formal education. We would like to look at them not from the point of view of their disadvantage but from the point of view of their motivation for self-development. Outcomes of this project could have impact also to formal education. We would like to use unique method of talent management to help disadvantaged young people to discover their talents and strengths and develop them for benefit of others. We want to combine methods of talent management with experiential pedagogy to create unique programmes and methods that will lead to increasing the quality and innovation in youth work as talent management is not very much used as a method in work with disadvantaged young people. We have identified following needs among the target group: 1. Their self-esteem is usually very low, because they don’t have any positive patterns in their homes. They see themselves as those who are predestined to be unsuccessful in their life, because their parents are also unsuccessful. In many cases their school results are not good and they see themselves as those who doesn’t even need to try because they don’t know anything. 2. Many young people, belonging to this group, have their natural talents but they don’t realize them and don’t develop them, because they don’t believe it is really a talent that can be developed. Also the topic of identifying talents and developing them in youth work is still not very well known and there is a lack of methods how to do it and how to help young people not only to discover their talents but also to use them for benefit of others. 3. Very often also there is a point of view on them that they rarely have any talents but it is not true. They are much more focused on their weaknesses, they know exactly, what they are not able to do. And very often also the pint of view of youth workers and social workers is focused on helping them overcome their difficulties and weaknesses, much more than on helping them develop their strengths. 4. Even if there are youth workers and