Nomadways

🦒 Apply to our partner’s project: Flying Graffes!

when: 20–28 June 2026
where: Stare Juchy, Poland
deadline to apply: 31 March 2026

👉 Please let us know if you apply! And also feel free to mention in the application form that you heard about the project through Nomadways.

ℹ️ More about the project:
It’s a workshop on Nonviolent Communication (NVC) taking place in Poland.
This training is made for youth workers already familiar with the basics of NVC.

The project is organised by Sylwia, founder of Fundacja Mudita, whom some of you may remember from the Non-Violent Theatre project in Corrèze back in 2019. We’re partners of this project, and our Ilaria will also join as a participant, continuing her NVC learning path. We love the trainer, Paulina - her work is truly inspiring!

CLOWNnection Booklet: Sharing our learnings!

📒 We published this booklet so we can share our harvest from the CLOWNnection journey. Find out how clown practices and visual facilitation helped us explore emotions, connection, and playful learning together.

Inside, you’ll find exercises, insights, and visual ideas you can adapt to bring more curiosity, empathy, and joy into your work with young people.

📌 You can download it for free from our website - link in the first comment.

Our Erasmus+ project CLOWNnection took place from 1st to 12th September in Vayrac and was a joyful success!

Together with our dream team (Bruno, Julia, Ilaria, and Pauline), we welcomed 26 youth workers from France, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, and Latvia. We explored the art of clowning as a way to connect, communicate, and bring authenticity into youth work.

The setting: surrounded by the wild, beautiful nature of the Dordogne river, ancient trees, and silent old caves tucked into the hill behind us. This environment was perfect for our experience, because it helped us to get grounded, to slow down and align to our pace, as it was a constant invitation back to the present moment (thank you, dear chickens!).

And presence was the essence of our work: exploring clowning as a deep practice of simply being here. It meant not projecting into the future or staying trapped by past fears, but truly being present with the body, with our own emotions, and with each other.

This is a truth well-known to youth workers: presence is everything.
We also explored visual language in the same spirit. Letting go of adult fears like “I don’t know how to draw” (or the hidden belief that we should draw like Leonardo da Vinci) and moving towards something much more useful:
“What I draw is good enough to support the message I want to communicate.”

We drew, mapped, and marked experiences as they were: not perfect, who cares really?! But honest, alive, and meaningful.
It wasn’t easy, because literally we are constantly pushed to aim for perfection, as if it existed! And perfection is not a message we want to pass on to young people, it only leads to feeling never enough.

So we trained something else:
✨ practice over perfection
✨ authenticity over performance
✨ presence over control

We dared to embrace our oddness. We created many “discarded” attempts. And slowly, we discovered a few pearls hidden inside them.

Because, not a spoiler: if we don’t try, we don’t find anything.
Luckily, our chef Gustaw prepared delicious meals, and we often shared outdoors looking at the river. These moments were essential for reflection and nourishment. Food integrated our learning rhythm, confirming that hydration and care is fundamental, not secondary, when engaging in intensive collective work.

Clowning and visual facilitation finally met through a closing event of “conférence gesticulée”! A living, embodied way to merge contents, visual languages, performing, and storytelling.
Two disciplines that may seem far apart, yet are both deeply rooted in listening, presence, and letting things flow.
Two weeks of living and learning together, where we could envision new approaches to show up as youth workers. While we acknowledge the doubts, limitations, and difficult emotions inherent in "on the field work," we now are equipped with new skills we can use to better support the youth we serve: the playful wisdom of the clown and the clarity of visual facilitation.
We also created a collective oracle of drawings and keywords: a map of the clown’s wisdom!

You can have a look here: https://shorturl.at/zF7gN or
download it here: https://shorturl.at/8nQsh

A practical booklet with activities, reflections, and visual tools is on its way.

More soon 🤡🖍️🌿