23/02/2020
Greece
participants
Our initiative has a really important aim and this is to remind our volunteers and international students that their physical as well as mental health are crucial matters in their lives that they should pay more attention to.
In fact, our goal is to show them when they treat themselves in a bad way in everyday life and how they can change this. HelMSIC and EFPSA are really helping in this project with their expertise as their volunteers are specialized trainers.
What is more, we raise awareness about people who suffer from mental disorders and addictions and we manage to make international students realise that those people are humans just like us. So, in this case we are trying to fight social stigma.
We started cooperating with two NGOs, HelMSIC the organisation of medical students and EFPSA the organisation of psychology students. We came to an agreement with them in many ways.
Specifically, we agreed with HelMSIC that our volunteers can attend in their workshops relevant to AIDS, mental disorders, addictions and at the same time we agreed that our volunteers, international students and their incomings can participate in educational activities related to sexual health and human rights and peace.
Regarding EFPSA we agreed that we will implement their project Mind the Mind which is referring to mental illnesses and our understanding about it. Both international students and volunteers will have the opportunity to attend.
Additionally, these two organisations participated in our National Training Event in Ioannina providing us facilitators and they delivered workshops on Crisis Management, Empathy and Mindfulness and the last two terms are something new for our network but really important and helpful for our lives.
HelMSIC organisation will also attend our National Event, The Crete Trip in order to help us organise it in a more health sustainable way.
So, with this collaboration we inform and train our volunteers and international students in matters that we do face in everyday life but we continuously ignore.
Our initiative has numerous results in ESN Greece as our volunteers have the necessary tools to work on some soft skills and in this way they will be more prepared to combine their life and volunteering in ESN. With this collaboration we covered topics that are really difficult to be implemented by ESN volunteers even though those matters are important for us and our organisation.
As for the international students, they do understand more things about everyday life and how their approach to it affects them the most.
With both of these outcomes we manage our network to be way more effective and healthy.
