Rome (Italy). The Youth Pastoral Sector, on the occasion of the Immaculate, invites the Educating Communities to assume the proposal of the world Educational Project “I Can”.
The Councilor for Youth Pastoral, Sr. Runita Borja, wrote a letter in which she presented the project as an opportunity to feel ourselves even more on the side of young people, “to find an agreed upon and collective, shared and responsible response to the challenge of the ecological crisis and climate change” (Appeal of Pope Francis and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, September 1, 2017) and to be “in harmony with the 2018 Final Synod Document”.
The project was prepared by the Congregation for Catholic Education and by OIEC, to which the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians adhered.
“Children, teenagers, and young adults have accepted the challenge Pope Francis launched with the Encyclical ‘Laudato Sì and are adhering through Associations and Congregations, Movements and Groups, to this project of care for our ‘common home’ and of commitment to improve the environment in which they live. They are the protagonists for the change needed to reach the Objectives of Sustainable Development (ODS) by 2030, on a journey accompanied by educators”.
The proposal encourages the creation of concrete projects of transformation and improvement of their personal and social-environmental realities in the classrooms and in the playgrounds, at school and at Oratory-Youth Centers, in gyms and in Group Homes, among the youngest in the nursery school as among University students in a critical, creative, and collaborative way, using the leadership methodology “Design for Change”.
“The various phases of each project are in harmony with the Preventive System: see the context; imagine solutions; act and build change; share accomplishments in order to contagion and inspire a large number of people; evaluate; begin again.”
The actualization of the proposal in the FMA educating communities will start a world chain of children and young people who change the world, step by step, putting into play four fundamental and typically Salesian competencies: critical thought, creativity, spirit of collaboration, communication.
The paper and digital material was sent to the Provinces to animate and implement this worldwide ecclesial proposal. The children, the young are the potential of the Educating Communities: “they – as Pope Francis says – know how to work with heart, head, and hands … and together they can change the world”.
