Generation Europe – Young Democracy in Action! is a three-year educational programme involving a network of 30 organisations from 20 European countries, aimed at including in the current political discourse young people with diverse backgrounds, strengthening their active role in society, facilitating dialogue with political decision-makers and promoting critical reflection on topics of inclusion, education and active participation (generationeurope.org).

Generation Europe is structured on trilateral partnerships of European associations that annually organise an international workshop based on non-formal practices and methodologies, to train young people for political and social participation, care of their environmental context and relationships, and active citizenship in the local, national and European context. Between one workshop and another, the young people will carry out awareness-raising projects at local level on themes chosen by themselves, and will participate in an international conference in Strasbourg in autumn 2019 together with their peers of all 30 European organisations involved in the project.

The first international workshop, entitled NO WASTE!, will take place from November 25 to December 6, 2018 in the new headquarters of Centro di Creazione e Cultura at PARC Performing Arts Research Centre in the Cascine Park in Florence, with the participation of 30 young Italians, Greeks and Germans. Wednesday, December 5 at 17.00 the path will end with an itinerant public restitution in the indoor and outdoor spaces of PARC.

Participants will be solicited through theoretical approaches, games and artistic practices successfully tested within the European network ROOTS & ROUTES : practices that link art and pedagogy (and art as pedagogy) and establish connections between contemporary languages and the public sphere, and which offer open and safe spaces where young people can meet in conditions of equality, acquire the confidence necessary to articulate their individual and group cultural identity in the European context, become protagonists of their own future and of the future of their communities.

Generation Europe is coordinated by the German association IBB Internationales Bildungs- und Begegnungswerk in Dortmund with the support of the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. For the international trilateral partnership, Centro di Creazione e Cultura operates with ROOTS & ROUTES Cologne (Germany) and SMouTh Synergy of Music Theatre in Larissa (Greece). The Italian partnership includes Esplora (Itri-LT), Meta Soc. Coop. Soc. Onlus (Rome) and Risorsa Europa (Latina).

The international NO WASTE! workshop has obtained the support of Città Metropolitana di Firenze.

[photo: Lorenzo Ciacciavicca, detail]