At St. Francis de Sales Institute, we take pride in delivering exceptional service and positively impacting our students’ and partners’ lives. Don’t just take our word for it—read what they have to say about their experiences with us. Their stories inspire us to continue striving for excellence every day.
What Do They Have To Say About St. Francis de Sales Institute?
Reflections on Nurturing Hearts Project: A Journey of Transformation through Non-Formal Education by BOHDANA MARCHENKO ... the Nurturing Hearts project has been an extraordinarily enriching experience. It has provided me with invaluable insights into the Salesian educational model and the power of non-formal education. This journey has equipped me with the skills and knowledge to foster meaningful relationships with young people, empower them, and create dynamic learning environments. Most importantly, it has reinforced my belief that true education is about inspiring change from within, making young people genuinely enthusiastic about learning and growing. This project truly exemplifies how effective and impactful non-formal education can be in shaping the lives of young individuals.
Overall, the participation in the training course “Nurturing Hearts” was a transformative experience for me. It helped me to realize how I can use the new knowledge and tools in my profession, in my Soft Skills School. Currently, I am developing the methodology of developing, evaluating and monitoring the soft skills in students of IT STEP University (Ukraine, Lviv) and will use the tools I have studied here on the training course. Also, this course and the trainers inspired me to develop my own program based on the activities they taught us. Moving forward, with a nurturing heart, I would like to implement the new developed methodology of non-formal education into the formal education. I believe it will help people to be happier. Thank you for this unbelievably valuable experience!
Recently, I had the privilege of halting, albeit briefly, in order to participate in a MentorPower training course entitled ‘Mentoring Disadvantaged Young People’, organised by the Friends of Don Bosco NGO. In fact, the reflection points below are giving my perspective and specifically how mentorship is part of my role as a Caregiver to young people in care and how the course helped me in my work journey…Overall, all topics presented were somehow or other relevant either to me as a person and mentor or to my duties with the young people I work with. Following the course, I found myself repeating the quote “It is enough that you are young for me to love you” in an attempt to remember it. This John Bosco quote was delivered to us as part of a presentation revolving around the topic of Non-Formal Education with a Salesian perspective. It is a quote that struck me as it describes the attitude I perceive during my work duties with the young people in care. This feeling and thought re-stabilizes me every time, after every shift, into starting afresh and persevering as necessary within the safe parameters.
The spark of happiness spins in the informal sphere of life, where education is offered in a non-coercive way, on a friendly relationship rather than on authority. This relationship creates a path on which educator and educated, mentor and mentee, teacher and pupil walk together. In a lecture by Bryan Magro: Non-Formal Education a Matter of the Heart - A Salesian Perspective, we were presented with the Salesian way of the educational relationship based on the model of sectors of space: home, school, playground, church; values: freedom, responsibility, solidarity, meaning; and criteria: family atmosphere, capacity to learn, space of fun, meaningfulness. As we are a Salesian school, this methodology was close to our hearts. In putting into practice Don Bosco's preventive system, we were comfortable with the chosen terminology of this educational approach, and we are aware that Mentoring is a person's personal education regarding empathy, kindness, and emotionality.
In my daily life, I am not a mentor. I am a student that helps in organising summer camps related to Don-Bosco. Because of this I was not very familiar with the mentoring relationship. The training course taught me all about the different aspects of being in a mentoring relationship and even though I am not a mentor, I think a lot of these aspects are still very important for my own work. When organising summer camps, you typically only see kids for one week a year. This makes it very hard, if not impossible to be a normal mentor to these kids. Regardless, a lot that we learned about the mentor relationship can still be applied in this setting, even if things need to be slightly.
At St. Francis de Sales Institute we...
value all learning
provide the best practices
apprenticeship and other forms of WBL
are international and work closely with Don Bosco International
cater for special needs
give special career and personal support
