Comune Di Sarezzo
Via Bailo 47, 25068 Sarezzo, Italy
A practice of processes and methods
“Points Communs” is an idea born from the collaboration between colleagues who operate in the youth information sector in France and Italy, specifically the youth information services and Eurodesk of Lyon and the municipality of Sarezzo.
This project gave a group of youth workers the opportunity to work side by side with young people coming from different social backgrounds, putting themselves to the test in constructing proposals to present to local administrators in the region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region and in Lombardy. As a matter of fact “Points Communs” was an Erasmus Plus KA3 project begun in 2019 and finished at the end of 2022, managing to survive to a series of problematic situations first of all the covid 19 pandemic.
Its aims were to:
1. support the diffusion of structured dialogue
2. promote the recognition of all dialogue processes involving young people at local and regional, national and European level.
3. provide youth workers useful tools for the realization of an effective and constructive dialogue between young people, politicians and youth information officers.
4. allow young professionals to help work groups develop spaces for discussion
5. encourage the active participation of young people in both local and European democratic life
The principles from which we started were meeting and working together. For this reason, the Crij of Lyon and the Informagiovani of the Municipality of Sarezzo have created a series of in-depth moments that have favored the birth of a real process of dialogue. The challenge was to interconnect different types of needs: on the one hand, training Eurodesk operators in disseminating Key Action 3 and specifically the European dialogue, promoting the active participation of young people, but at the same time also supporting local administrators, allowing everyone to fully express their role. To be more credible it was important for us to work just at a local level.
All the work was supported by youth workers specialized in mediation and group facilitation. This helped to better define the action strategies and to put the proposals that emerged from the debates into practice.
The project was carried out both in Italy and in France. The first meeting took place in Sarezzo (1.300 inhabitants). Here the group worked on the methodologies, the different approach discussing with mayors and administrators of small and medium-sized towns.
The second phase should have taken place a few months after the start of the activities, but everything was frozen until September 2022 when the activities resumed and ended in November in Lyon. Here the comparison with the city dimension determined the difference in approach.
The number of participants that we involved was 30 people for each territorial event (8 Eurodesk operators, 8 administrators and 8 young people, 3 facilitators, a video maker, two coordinators) and 200 people for the final event in Lyon. Completing the project was truly a challenge, both because the groups of participants were not constant, and because of the fluctuating participation of the politicians involved. In any case, the result, despite the premises, was very positive, both in terms of interest on the part of the participants and their ability to interact with politicians of different backgrounds.
The good practice that we would like to bring is the successful collaboration between equal institutions, such as youth information centers/Eurodesk centers that operate in different countries in opposite contexts both in terms of size and type of user. The challenge was to interconnect different types of needs: on the one hand, train Eurodesk operators to disseminate Key Action 3 and specifically the European dialogue, promote the active participation of young people, but at the same time also support local administrators, allowing everyone the full expression of their role. The objective that we achieved was to implement shared experiences from which concrete tools could be created for promoting young people’s participation in decision-making processes. The youth information centers, in fact, are by statute the bodies responsible for disseminating information relating to 4 areas of competence: school, work, free time and social life, international mobility. As representatives of the European Eurodesk network, they also have the specific mandate to disseminate the actions of the Erasmus+ programme, even though sometimes information on the functioning of the administrative machine, as well as of the role of local administrators are not so well known even among professionals.
Organisation and practice