This story is a composite: it brings together the paths of several young people in Kora’s Erasmus+ accredited project 2022–2024. It does not describe one real person.
The first time, you arrive as a participant. You don’t know anyone, the farm is half an hour’s walk from the nearest shop, and the programme is full of words you’ve never heard: energisers, reflection groups, Youthpass. By the end of the week you are cooking for the whole group with someone from another country, and you go home wanting more.
A few months later your organisation asks if you’d like to come back, this time to LEAD UP!, a training course for youth leaders. Here the roles change. You practise active listening and giving feedback, you learn what can go wrong in an exchange and how to prevent it, and you design an activity and run it for the rest of the group. Being in the leader’s position feels strange at first. Then it starts to feel like yours.
Then it’s your turn. You come back to La Buona Terra leading your national group in a youth exchange: preparing them before departure, running the daily reflection group, being the person they come to when something isn’t working. Seven of the leaders trained in LEAD UP! took exactly this step.
And then, at the Evaluation Seminar, you sit down with youth workers from across Europe to look back at what worked and what didn’t, and to imagine what comes next. Out of those days came four new youth-exchange ideas, written by participants: about traditional crafts, about nature, about circus and self-expression, about mental health.
From participant, to leader, to someone imagining the next project: that is the path Kora wanted to open with this project.
Part of the Erasmus+ accredited youth mobility project 2022-1-IT03-KA151-YOU-000068290. Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Agenzia Italiana per la Gioventù. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
