Project Description
The Kahane Foundation, based in Bern, co-financed Tree of Life International in 2018 and the “Vivi Ciò Che Sei” program to promote growth opportunities for young people, and in particular the “Needs4Neets” project for supporting and reducing the number of Neet – young people not involved in studying, neither in working nor in training.
The “ViviCiòCheSei” (“Live what you are”) project (thematic area: Child and Youth distress) arises from the desire to propose a wide range of interventions and growth opportunities for young people and for the entire territorial community, through a pedagogical action aimed at young people that represent a chance for their development and growth.
In fact, children and young people are the first to suffer consequences and effects of a problematic neighborhood where lack of opportunities for growth, leisure and diversion generate escape attitudes that lead or that can lead to disinterest and forms of deviant or delinquent aggregation.
Difficulties that children and young people live in the peripheral contexts also depends on a difficult relationship with adults. Young people do not recognize themselves in adults society and do not feel part of their vision of the city, as very often environments and places are conceived from an adult-centric perspective.
The different paradigm introduced by the adoption of the International Convention on the Rights of Childhood and Adolescence leads us to the idea that children and young people are social agents able to play an active role in their social context. They can have a leading role in the transformation of the periphery, becoming a cultural reference for the territory and for the administrators.
For this to happen, it is necessary to promote three fundamental actions: let the children speak, know how to listen to them and take their opinions seriously, as also underlined in Art. 12 of the Convention.
At the same time, adult will have to review his own unique and competent adult certainties and place himself in a state of careful and sensitive observation of children and teenagers behavior and skills, while at the same time recovering the memory of his childhood.
It is therefore necessary to give “space” without imposing oneself but accompanying them in a path of growth and awareness.
“Viviciochesei” is precisely a space for youth participation as a container of projects and services open to the local reality. Children can here experiment as protagonists of their own life and of the community, through educational processes aimed at enhancing the person as a unique and special being.
In this space we offer diversified workshop paths built and elaborated involving boys and girls who have expressed needs, opinions and who have made proposals.
