The planned project outputs have been designed to enlighten about new forms of youth-led bottom-up advocacy actions for a sustainable transition. R/A acted as a device for enabling civil society stakeholders – public administrators, local NGOs, public-private organisations – to incorporate youth-driven proposal for future scenarios related to climate change resilience and urban sustainable development. Among the objective we wanted to achieve: - The opportunity to engage in design thinking and co-design practices as tools for self realisation and well-being. - Young NEETs as catalysts of new European sustainable urban environments, able to imagine and to co-create the future they want. - Supporting/inspiring stakeholders engaged in dealing with challenges that pursue common objectives towards a real and effective sustainable development. - Produce practical outputs out of a design-based learning-by-doing process that result in multidimensional impacts with regards to citizen empowerment and social inclusion. - R/A aimed to put in place an architecture of learning-by-doing activities that focus on socio-cultural value and enhance interactions among participants, focusing on cooperative learning techniques.
We applied with Response/Ability (R/A) in order to collaboratively design and trigger a series of active citizenship dynamics that can facilitate the multiplication of spaces for inclusion, empowerment and innovation regardless of whether the main target group is actually interested in undergoing a professional career as designers or not. Specifically, among the needs we addressed referred to the main target groups (young NEETs and professionals of youth-related NGOs) we have put in place a quali-quantitative research, which provided us with a series of insights related to their needs, in particular: DESIGN AUTONOMY; SOCIO-CULTURAL CHALLENGES; URBAN CONTEXT; DESIGN POSTURE; CARE. Main needs arisen and consequently were addressed throughout the project lifecycle were: - Need to acquire skills on how to organize one's own time; to have professional and personal empowering platforms, beyond volunteering; to have vocational guidance to find their path/motivation in professional life. . - Related to urban challenges: Lack of green areas, mobility, digital services, accessibility of public spaces, housing. - Related to innovative educational models. - Need to align the mismatching between skills, educational and job-search policies.