TURFU's main objective is to provide youth workers with skills, tools and methods for training in knowledge of the future, in order to develop the imagination and reveal and strengthen the future-knowledge capacities of young people aged 16 to 25 living in marginalized areas. Our project aims to achieve four specific objectives: 1. Strengthen young people's ability to imagine possible futures through participatory learning workshops. 2. Encourage young people to think critically and creatively about what the future might be, and empower them to shape it. 3. Support youth workers and training staff to develop innovative educational programs in non-formal or informal education. More specifically, we aim to support capacity building for youth leaders in speculative design, future education and digital prototyping. 4. Create exchanges between young adults in Europe, notably on their vision of the future. The project aims to bring together contributions from different countries to create a common imaginative framework made up of multiple visions of the future.
In some places, people find it more difficult to imagine a future in the place where they live, a necessary step towards individual and collective empowerment. These marginalized territories (e.g., urban peripheries, rural areas) are not part of the common imagination of the future. Consequently, for the inhabitants of these territories, it is often easier to imagine their departure than to think about how to transform them. At the same time, according to UNESCO, improving forward-looking literacy enables people to perceive change more quickly and make choices in a constantly evolving world marked by climate change, pandemics, economic crises and social exclusion. According to UNESCO, without an image of the future that inspires hope and fosters collaboration, the risk of despair and disillusionment is high. The risk of a lack of imagination can be overcome by improving knowledge of the future within communities, particularly the most disadvantaged. TURFU aims to give young people in marginalized areas the opportunity to imagine and transform alternative futures for the places where they live.