As you might know, YEE works as a network. Our members, environmental youth NGOs are settled all over Europe to realize actions linked to the environment. Our office in Toulcuv Dvur, Prague, serves as the central platform, and spreads the information all over the network. However, sometimes the different organisations meet each other directly, which permits us to exchange best practices, knowledge, methods and skills.

That is what we did for 7 days, from 15 to 22 of April 2011. A youth exchange took place in Strnadovsky Mlyn, a place situated 70km south of Prague. During this week we met people from 7 different countries and organisations. The aim was to share with each other different methods of environmental education.

As YEE volunteers we were part of the organising team, but we were also there as participants of the 'Czech team' together with Hnuti Brontosaurus, a Member Organisation of YEE settled all over the Czech Republic.

As organizers we brought support to participants, took care of the agenda, organised the evening programs and tried to make everybody feel good and integrated. We welcomed participants with some games to get to know each other. Then a treasure hunting permitted us to start creating some team spirit in a funny and educational way.

Each day we insured different kind of activities like energizers at the beginning of the sessions, movies for the evening, international fire camps, games night, farewell party... Since the aim of the project was to learn from each other, we were making sure that everything went well, but all participants were actively taking part in the realization of the activities.

As participants we presented the activity of a Hnuti Brontosaurus weekend but in a smaller scale. In order to respect the method of the organisation it had to contain 3 parts: work, education and experiential program. Thus we had some practical work by helping the mill's staff to clean the stream after winter by taking away some tree trunks from the water and cutting wood. Then we organised workshops about environmental art, herbs and theatre. Finally we had a lecture about the organisation, to present more deeply how it works and its method.

We did learn a lot during those 7 days, indeed every organisations brought many different ideas and had their own way to share their methods. Each team was sharing their experience by interactive lectures and through workshops. It permitted us to learn by doing and have a concrete experience about how they manage environmental education in their respective countries.

There have been so many things to share and learn that it would be impossible to tell you everything here. However, here are some examples of the activities we did:

• Quest to clean the area of the mill

• Handcrafting by using garbage

• Realisation of natural art

• Building solar ovens

• Games with nature

• Water monitoring

• Puppet theatre

It has been an inspiring and passionate experience for all of us.

 Mercedes and Mathieu