Rome (Italy). On June 22, 2019, the Youth Pastoral Sector held a meeting with Honorable Juan Antonio Ojeda (La Salle – Spain), Head of Educational Projects of the International Office of Catholic Education (OIEC); with Monica Cantón Celis (CEO Design for Change Global – Spain); and with Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder of Riverside School in Ahmedabad (2001), with the aim of deepening an educational model focused on “quality learning”, “student well-being,” and “empathy in education”.
In 2009, Sethi investigated the principles practiced in Riverside to establish the “Design for Change” movement with the aim of leading children and young people to drive change in their communities by unleashing what they call “I can superpower”.
“I can, We can” is the World Educational Project that makes us feel more on the side of young people “to find an agreed on and collective response, shared and responsible to the challenge of the ecological crisis and climate change” (Appeal of Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, 1 September 2017).
Boys and girls, adolescents and young people have accepted the challenge of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ and have joined the International Project I CAN! taking care of the “common home” and improving the environment in which they live.
Together with many educators, the Sector believes that young people can change the world: they are the protagonists of a radical change to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (ODS) by 2030, and will accompany them with an educational and passionate heart.
They will work in the classroom and in the courtyards, at school and at the oratory- youth centers, in gyms, and in family homes, among the little ones of the kindergarten as well as among university students in a critical, creative, and collaborative way, using the Design for Change methodology so that concrete projects can be created to transform and improve the personal and socio-environmental reality.
The various phases of each project or story of change in “I can” are in tune with the Preventive System: see the context; imagine solutions; act and build change; share your accomplishments to infect and inspire large numbers of people; evaluate and restart.
A worldwide chain of children and young people will be involved and this means changing the world, step by step, bringing into play four fundamental and typically Salesian skills: critical thinking, creativity, the spirit of collaboration, communication, trusting in the potential present in the Educating Communities: the small, the young.
They – as Pope Francis says – know how to work with the heart, with the head, and with the hands. Together WE CAN change the world.
OIEC e DFC presented the entire process that they are doing for the world meeting with the Pope in November.
