Year 3 Italy
Personal, Community and Global Resilience
For the third time, about 26 young people from Belgium, Catalonia and Italy came together for one week in an international exchange about resilience, this time in Céfalu (Italy). This project, promoted by Erasmus+ (European Union), challenged us to think critically about this concept and how it encompasses real life problems and solutions.
Being resilient is having the ability to adapt to a changing situation. On a personal level, this is about reacting to personal setbacks (losing a dear one, loneliness, friendships that end etc.). Not only people, but also communities, countries and the global world have to be resilient. This last year we focused on the three themes to close off this three-year exchange project.
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Activities
In preparing the activities, the youngsters of the three countries each focused on another subtheme: personal, community and global resilience. Next to the activity each country prepared to give the others an intro in a subtheme of resilience, we were guided through the concept of resilience with the help of Palma Nana Coop. This is an organization that focusses on environmental education and responsible tourism. In Serra Guarneri, their center for environmental education, they aim to promote ecological awareness through non-formal education workshops and activities.
The Catalans had prepared an activity regarding personal resilience, where they explained the The Cycle of Adaptive Change (resilience infinity) and applied it to our personal lives. Belgium created a game called Community Monopoly, that encouraged the players to think about community resilience. The Sicilians educated us about global resilience and the sustainable development goals (SDG’s).
The knowledge we gathered about the concept during the week funneled into an action day: a social restyling of La Torre in Sant’Ambrogio, a local landmark. We cleaned and decorated the area to make it more accessible and pleasant for the local community and interviewed the residents of Sant’Ambrogio about resilience and the project.
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During the day and at night, we participated in various extra activities and knowing games to get to know each other and to create a strong group atmosphere. We learned about the trees in Serra Guarneri and about the origins of the food we had every day, had multiple educational walks in the woods, made an exhibition presenting our fictional planets and learned how to professionally taste olive oil from a local farmer. We also went to Cefalù, where we were free to swim in the sea and have dinner on the beach. To finish our week at Serra Guarneri, we climbed La Rocca and reflected on this exchange.