First Mobility: Paris!

First Mobility: Paris!

In February, the SPG project entered one of its most intense and important phases, as the journey of participation came into life in a very concrete form: the first mobility of our youngsters from February 27th to March 1st!

The young participants from Italy (Agorà), Romania (Polylogos) and Portugual (CAI) all travelled to France to be hosted by the Theatre of the Oppressed. A first group of youngsters got the chance to get to know each other, share their point of view and explore Paris all together.

On the first day, they engaged with a forum-theatre play focused on the SPGs goals, organized and delivered by the theatre of the Oppressed company, as a preparation and entry in matter to the next objectives of the project, in which they will have to implement their own forum-theatre. Doing so, they will get to argument their own ideas on stage and to make their audience react and interact with the main themes of the project. This part of the mobility was a way to introduce them to a type of theatre they will use later on in the project.

Later that day, the youngsters participated in a talk with the outside speaker Pierre-Alix Binet, a professional in sustainable finance, on the different causes for climate change, especially in the field of finances. Through that talk, they heard about the way money and the way it is managed can have huge influences on the environment and could exchange on the possibilities for improvement in this field for a sustainable management of finances, from a small and individual scale to a country or even international scale.

On the second day, an emphasis way made on allowing for conversations to arise between the youngsters themselves on the different Sustainable Development Goals. In smaller groups, they discussed the goal that they chose, trying to discern three main problematics that are currently faced with that specific goal and to decide together the solutions that could be implemented in response.

After that time, each group got to present the issues and solutions they found to be the most important ones in front of the rest of the youngsters to share everyone’s idea and put them together.

During the forum theatre, a lot of the youngsters came up on stage to enact their ideas about each of the sustainable participation goal.

On the evening, all the youngsters gathered to have dinner together at a bouillon, allowing for a discovery of some of the most traditional French suppers and for conversation to flow in a non-formal context.

On the afternoon, the youngsters got to visit the city of Paris a bit better, accompanied by the youth workers, they had many choices between a cultural visit of the Louvre museum, a visit of Paris from the Seine on the Bateaux-mouche or even some shopping option with the visit of the Rivoli street ! - The photo shows the Portuguese group in front of the Town Hall.

Overall, the youngsters were very happy of their visit as well as the organisators, the french team that was delighted to host the first mobility of the project.

It arose as a beautiful opportunity for the youngsters to start sharing all of the reflexions they had when working on the project in their own countries and to confront these visiosn internationally, whitin a multi-cultural background. Seeing how good the exchanges were between all the youngsters and how they benefited from these interractions, the following mobility was awaited eagerly.