UTF! had 2 main objectives: 1) to create, on a small scale, an international development team-community of young people, educators and experts, which, starting from the needs that emerged, would trigger participatory processes of co-design and validation of a Serious Play, conceived as an educational tool to be offered to Youth Workers, in order to improve their ability to accompany young people in difficulty in their daily activities; 2) to create the BETA version of a Serious Play, called BE THE FORCE! based on Star Wars concepts and elements, through 3 preparatory phases. The Serious Play, the tool to be bequeathed to the European Youth Workers, co-created directly with a group of young people and already validated during the project, aims at educating young people to a more systemic thinking and acting, i.e. coherent with the complexity of reality, supporting them to make more balanced and forward-looking choices, to flourish during and after difficult situations.
UTF! was a project dedicated to young people, done with young people. The aim was to intercept the main emerging needs, which exploded in the pandemic and post-pandemic period: relational marginalisation, exacerbated by the phenomenon of social isolation and the ubiquitous daily digital mediation (to study, to meet, to lecture, etc.); increased relative poverty of young people, due to the loss, or decrease in workload, caused by the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic. ); an increase in the relative poverty of young people, due to the loss, or reduction in the workload, caused by the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic, which has also exacerbated the need for better orientation and relocation in the labour market; an increase in the risk of radicalism, a phenomenon which, according to the most recent sociological theories (cf. the studies of ROY OLIVIER), is nothing other than an attempt to find strong meanings, during a condition of anomie and numbness, in which one is more fragile emotionally and cognitively. To this, we must add the fundamental need to give European YWs a tool, UTF! output, to help them support young people who have the needs just described, helping them to think in a more holistic, systemic way