Your Way – Your Style

Vocational guidance for highly gifted young people

Project info

HerausForderung e.V. Dorsten
founded 2021
Contact persons: Mrs. Daniela Kasche, Dr. Stefanie Marzian, honorary chairwomen of the association
www.herausforderung.online

Location: Dorsten and surrounding area

Project: Vocational guidance for highly gifted young people
For the affected students in the Dorsten region, appropriate career counseling will be established and expanded in the coming years.

Our sponsorship
Contribution to the costs of designing, setting up and implementing this project with € 5000 per year for the next three years.

Funding period: 2023 to 2025

HerausForderung e.V. is a contact point for cognitively gifted and highly gifted, highly sensitive and/or autonomous children and adolescents and their families in Dorsten and far beyond.

Individual counseling, coaching, network building with companies, universities and local actors, project days/workshops with school classes, participation in events from the field of career counseling… are planned for highly gifted young people, especially those who, for various reasons, cannot reach their potential (underachievers).

Workshop Traumberuf

The project operator

The association HerausForderung e.V. closes a gap in the school education system for the above-mentioned children and adolescents and their parents, which presents special challenges. The association focuses primarily on underachievers (highly gifted underachievers) who hardly or not at all develop their potential at school and perform far below their potential. The reasons for this are as individual as the children and young people themselves. The association works on three levels:

  • Counseling and support of the affected children and adolescents
  • Counseling of parents and referral/funding for diagnostics (professionally qualified testing of IQ and other competencies)
  • Training and consulting of teachers and schools with diagnostic possibilities, creation of suitable framework conditions and information about further support possibilities

The association is always in exchange with well-known educational scientists and advocates individual learning – for all children and young people regardless of their social background, as well as their individual competencies and abilities.

Vocational guidance for highly gifted young people

Children and young people whose academic performance falls significantly short of what would be expected based on their enormous potential are referred to as underachievers or highly gifted underachievers.

Workshop Traumberuf
Workshop Traumberuf

The HerausForderung association would like to offer the young people concerned suitable career counseling if, for example, their regular school-leaving certificate is not sufficient for an apprenticeship or a course of study. It also aims to support young people who lack self-confidence due to poor grades or systemic disadvantage.

Specifically, several measures are planned:

  • Individual case counseling and coaching
  • Network building with companies, universities and local actors (youth vocational assistance, secondary schools…), e.g. a programming course will be offered in summer 2023 in cooperation with the youth vocational assistance and the company NetTrek
  • Project days/workshops with school classes (e.g. workshop “Your Way – Your Style” for young people with the presentation of the results at the exhibition on the Days of the Basic Law in Dorsten – May 2023)
  • participation in events from the area of career counseling
  • Public relations
  • Fundraising
Workshop Traumberuf
Traumberuf Pilotin

Why we are committed to the project

The founders of the association convinced us with their concern, because they are explicitly not concerned with elite education or with transporting as much knowledge as possible into particularly intelligent children and young people as quickly as possible. Instead, they see particularly intelligent children and young people as young people with many facets and a special profile. They want to help the children and young people develop the skills and opportunities they have within them for their future professional lives that have not yet come to light.

Our wish: An inclusive society that understands differences between people as normal and accepts them. We want everyone to be able to develop their potential and thus contribute – participate.

Daniela Kasche and Dr. Stefanie Marzian, founders and chairpersons of HerausForderung e.V.

Outlook

We are very happy to support the association in this project in the next three years and are pleased about the enormous commitment with many ideas and big steps to make the vision of an inclusive society a reality.