This summer, we set off for Karlovac, Croatia, to participate in Your Voice, Our Europe, a Youth Exchange involving 30 young people from Spain, Italy, Portugal, Croatia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. During this rich experience, we developed essential skills and knowledges in active, community-based democratic participation, learning how to transform ideas into actions and complex shared societal problems into challenges that can be actively addressed through group decision-making, resolution-building and the development of realistic and sustainable projects within the framework of Erasmus+ Youth Opportunities. We also entered into stimulating dialogue, friendship and collaborative connection with other young people studying, working and creating change in other European countries who we now proudly consider to be part of a new youth network, a new youth network with whom we are keen to stay in dialogue to keep promoting democracy from our own communities in transnational and intercultural ways. The most striking learning activity of our experience was our collaborative development of a project proposal that aims to counteract an urgent socio-environmental challenge in our local communities in Sicily, Italy.
To put the knowledges and competences acquired from this engaging learning journey into practice, upon our return from Croatia we implemented our Action Plan (see attached at the end of the article) and developed a needs assessment (through an online survey) to gather youth community-based knowledge about a crucial socio-environmental issue that is affecting our local communities here in Sicily, Italy — the increasingly uncontrolled spread of wildfire, after a feedback session with Maghweb’s youth workers about the most transferable aspects of our experience. We thus asked 71 young people from different Sicani and Palermitan communities in Sicily about their level of engagement with the wildfires issue, their awareness of its frequency and gravity in their local communities and whether they would find our proposed—to-be-experimented—resolution of “drone monitoring” useful and pertinent in their contexts.
The survey helped us solidify a more solid “youthful” perception of this issue and highlighted that wildfires are an urgent issue for young people, with the majority of respondents defining them as a “grave problem” (over 60% of respondents), of which they are, in as much as they see them or talk about them multiple times a week (over 50% of participants). Even more concerning is that a high percentage of respondents’ homes and lands (just over 25%) have been directly damaged by wildfires. The survey was also crucial in identifying one of the perceived main causes for wildfires, revealing that while the heat stimulates fires, their uncontrolled spread and accelerated consumption of land and wildlife is caused by criminal, arson action, whereby paramaniacs perpetuate the mass spread of the fires. Beyond shedding light on the persistence and dynamics of the problem, the survey also recorded young people’s current sense of its potential resolutions, which revealed itself to be principally negative: an overwhelming majority of respondents feel that current prevention or resolution practices for fires are either ineffective (just under 48%) or only partly effective (just over 42%). Finally, the “drone monitoring” solution that we brainstormed and came up with during our learning experience in Croatia was welcomed by youth, but with caution—the majority of respondents would like to see it being tried out, but with clear and cautionary rules about privacy.
The knowledge gathered in our survey has become a useful starting point for further eventual group explorations into the world of project creation and development with Erasmus+ youth funding.
Many thanks to the youth workers of LAG Vallis Colapis for guiding us through this influential learning process.
Article written by Your Voice, Our Europe Italian participants Monica Barbaria, Giorgia Concetta Parisi, Diego Lo Burgio, Andreea Craciun, Paolo Salerno, Sofia Gannuscio in collaboration with sending organisation, Maghweb
Read and download the Action Plan: www.maghweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Action-plan.pdf