Ideal's in action

“I always thought that who sows utopia will reap reality” - Carlo PETRINI

The strategic partnership Idea(l)s in action addresses the issues of (youth) unemployment and the need to tends towards a more sustainable and inclusive development. It aims at inspiring and empowering people, allowing them to believe in their abilities to take action and to create the positive change they hope for their lives and communities.

To achieve those goals, we set up in 2016 a partnership between France, Greece, Italy and Portugal to:

• (a) theorize, improve and spread to new venues and new target groups a non-formal educational tool, the Heterotopia Tour, with high potentials in terms of people's empowerment and promotion of more sustainable ways of living, based on cooperation and respect of Human Rights and Nature;
• (b) share good practices in the field of social innovation, so that we can better meet the challenges we are facing: (youth) unemployment, social inclusion, sustainable development.

The project was therefore, at the same time:

• a training program for youth and social workers (educators, trainers, facilitators, etc.) ;
• a research program based on experiences in active pedagogy and non-formal education;
• an awareness program on social and environmental issues and a promotional project of social innovation and innovative lifestyles.

It lasted 22 months and included 4 Heterotopia Tours, 4 large-scale dissemination events and 12 peer-to-peer trainings and small-scale local events.

It led us to the creation of 2 main “Intellectual Outputs”:

• high-quality video/photo/audio coverage on inspiring social projects from Southern France, Greece, Sicily, and South Portugal, which are currently broadcasted on various channels and permanently accessible on an online transmedia platform: Heterotopies.net ;
• a Methodological Guide on “How to organize a Heterotopia Tour?” geared towards youth and social workers, educators and trainers.

Additional information on the visited projects, the workshops the participants took part in the trainings, the concepts they dealt with and their personal experience of the Tour are also available on this Wiki Doku site in the Testimonies section.

The youth and social workers who took part in the Tours experimented the tool, in order to master it, while leading a research on it, in order to extract its main elements (out of the circumstantial factors that can affect it) and improve the method.

At the same time, the young people who joined the program get an opportunity to discover innovative social projects while experimenting community life and sustainable lifestyles.

Thanks to public events , to peer-to-peer trainings, and to this Methodological Guide (which includes both young paticipants' testimonies and professionnal contents by the youth workers), they are spreading their results widely, within their communities and all over Europe.

In addition, the project allowed us, as partners, to develop our activities and reach out to new venues and new target groups, thanks to the exchange of our practices, the capacity-building of our key staff and the extension of our network. The project has been an opportunity for us to strengthen our cooperation and involve new counterparts in the process, creating thus dynamics at both local and European levels.

Finally, the project is a chance to bring a wide range of people and social organizations together around common wishes, objectives and values. It contributes to give shape to a common concept for lasting creation and evaluation of specific solutions, reconciling the development of human societies and the preservation of nature, respecting each culture, and update the sustainable paths within the current political context.