THE NETWORK

Municipality of Florence, Department of Youth Policies Municipality of Florence, Department for Public Instruction Municipality of Florence, Schools in the territory of the Region of Tuscany, Regional Education Office of Tuscany

PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND CONTEXT

GlobaLab is an empowerment programme aimed at young people between the age of 16 and 25 in the two segments 16-19 and 19-25. The basis is a proposal for scholastic, vocational and professional orientation which is rooted in a deep bond between the quality of individual existence and the need to enhance and strengthen opportunities for relationships, experimentation and reflection that focus on research, the discovery and care of one’s own talents and intelligence as well as that of others.

The Globalab programme has 3 main axes:

Axis 1: Projects aimed at educational institutions, complementing curricular education 

• Barriers project: a workshop pathway aimed at concretely mobilising the girls’ and boys’ planning skills, combining potential, cognitive, emotional and value resources in order to support them in expressing the strength of their ideas in conflict resolution.
• Vocational CPIA [Provincial Centres for Adult Education] project: Social/emotional skills as a whole are a comprehensive set of abilities essential for individuals to succeed at school, at work and to participate fully in society as active citizens. The Vocational CPIA [Provincial Centres for Adult Education] project complements the institutional pathway as a specific intervention for the emergence and enhancement of these skills in order to make CPIA students more aware and proactive.

Axis 2: Projects aimed directly at young people aged between 16 and 19

• ABF Talent4You project: Projects participating in the Call must be designed with the central aim of identifying innovative ways, strategies and resources to act in a solution-oriented and empowering way, taking into account their feasibility and sustainability. The winners are participants in a workshop that ends with an educational trip to the Holy Land.
• ABF Talent4Work project: it represents an opportunity for personal empowerment, through which the selected boys and girls will be able to face their working future in a proactive way, with a dynamic mindset and awareness of their own intelligence and skills.

Axis 3: Training events for young people and teachers  

• ABF Vocational Lab project: aimed at students, school managers, teachers, tutors and career counsellors, the ABF Vocational Day project promotes an idea of career guidance understood as creating the conditions for each girl and boy to express, manifest and recognise their potential. The workshops therefore take the form of a laboratory proposal focused on the development of skills and the enhancement of experiences related to the narration of the self and the mutual recognition of talent, fostering the emergence of each individual’s visioning capacity.
• ABF Wannabe Project 2023: Training event for vocational orientation purposes, focusing on the topic of interpersonal and communication skills.

Transversal to these axes is the creation of a Youth Committee for San Firenze: a place for the active participation of the girls and boys involved in the projects, aimed at redesigning the interventions for the following years.

OBJECTIVES

Creating the right conditions to guarantee young students:

INDICATORI DI PERFORMANCE

* Population aged 16-25 years resident in the Metropolitan City of Florence

PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROCESS

Stage 1: Identification on the basis of needs analysis, stakeholder mapping and partner assessment, with subsequent feasibility^* project;

Stage 2: Design undertaken by the in-house Team involving recipients, beneficiaries and local partners in co-design activities; 

Stage 3: Execution directly by ABF mandated personnel, or in partnership with local organisations supervised by the ABF team through structured and standardised forms of monitoring and evaluation; 

Stage 4: Evaluation using the indicators defined in the design stage;

Stage 5: Monthly narrative and four-monthly financial reporting.

* The context analysis required to identify the needs of potential beneficiaries and the actions to be undertaken includes a preliminary study and in-depth analysis on:
· 2030 Agenda as a framework for project guidance;
· OECD and WHO indicators for measuring transversal skills, soft-skills and socio-emotional skills;
· (It.) Ministerial Decree no. 774 of 4 September 2019 “Guidelines for transversal skills and orientation pathways”

IMPACTS ON THE COMMUNITIES

The possibility for a young person to discover his or her personal inclinations and talents and to learn transversal, but also emotional, growth tools activates the acquisition of self-awareness and thus the ability to make conscious and mature choices in one’s present and future with repercussions in terms of improving one’s relationships and potentially making oneself a leader in one’s community or a creator of new development contexts. 

For a teacher, the possibility of participating in development and education constitutes an opportunity to improve one’s own educational and training skills, which will take the form of the ability to support their students even better in their training and recognition of their talents.

During the year 2023, a new impact assessment model was used to measure the skills acquired and the participants’ perception of the project’s effectiveness through a system of ex-ante and ex-post monitoring and measurement to document the development profiles of specific skill areas. This model was applied in the Barriers project (AXIS 1), ABF Talent4You (AXIS 2).