News
VET (PACT) in action!
The Argentinian, El Salvadorian, Colombian, Hungarian and Spanish partners, together with us ATA, were all motivated to finally meet face to face in Argentina and discuss all parts of the VET Pact project which is financed by Erasmus+. So far, ATA has only met the Hungarian and Argentinian partners through other projects, so it was very necessary and useful to meet everyone.
The goals of the meeting were to get to know the partners face to face, to discuss all important aspects of the project, to clarify unclear aspects, and to get to know the Argentinian partner and city.
10 people participated in the meeting. Originally, there should have been 12 of us, 1 project coordinator and a financier from each country, but the El Salvadorian and Spanish partners were represented by only 1 person each, the project coordinators, because the financiers could not travel for objective reasons.
The meeting lasted three days. On the first day, we got to know the Argentinian host organization – which is the Network of Argentine Municipalities Against Climate Change -, we talked to the president and the representative of the main donor of the institution, and then each association introduced itself briefly to better understand who is who. Then we looked over the 2-year timeline of the project, broken down into days, we discussed the activities to be carried out in the next period, which are mostly administrative things and the research about vocational schools, which will help us better understand the main problems and difficulties of students and teachers. In the afternoon, we took over the communication and dissemination strategy of the project, where we presented the project logo and other communication tools, and then assigned the communication responsibilities for each week. In closing, we returned to the research process that day, discussing more specifically the next steps regarding the interview and the expert teams.
On the second day, a tour guide introduced the centre of the city of Rosario, where the main stops were the historic port and the customs office. Afterwards, we visited a youth centre, inside of it, the Che Guevara Museum (he was born in Rosario). From there, we walked along the Paraná River to the Falkland Islands memorial and then to the flag memorial next to it (the Argentinian flag was flown in this city for the first time) and we visited the Americas Flag Museum. After lunch, a 3-hour free visit was organized in the Museum of Democracy, where we could view historical and contemporary exhibits and stories about human rights, migration, the South American Juntas, and slavery.
On the morning of the third day, we talked about finances. We presented the possible cost types, monitoring and reporting tools and the currency exchange platform to the partners. In the afternoon, we agreed on the number of participants and dates of the meetings in Spain and El Salvador and answered all the questions related to the project. In closing, we reviewed the urgent and upcoming tasks and evaluated the meeting.
Every planned topic has been explored in detail. Most of the communication was in English, but there were occasions when the 4 Spanish-speaking partners clarified certain things in Spanish, and in our free time we and the Hungarian partner chatted in Hungarian. The most important information was presented on Google Drive and with a PowerPoint presentation, but most of the meeting was conducted through conversations.
As a final regard it can be said that the meeting was very successful. The hosting organization was very helpful, and they made us feel safe in order to understand how, where and why they work, and the attitude and motivation of all partners convinced us that the project would be successful.
