-
Hello, my name is Alberto Cottica.
-
I work at the Council of Europe
-
on a project called EdgeRyders,
-
it is about the transition of young people
-
to an independent, active life.
-
If you look at the data,
-
young europeans seem pretty much like a lost generation.
-
Unemployment is very high,
-
and what’s worse, about one person in five
-
is not in employment, education or training.
-
This does not happen only in your early twenties.
-
It actually gets worse as you go towards your mid-thirties.
-
What we’re looking at here is a general loss of autonomy
-
of the adult population.
-
The young just happen to be in the line of fire.
-
But that’s not the whole story.
-
Europe, and indeed the world,
-
are full of extremely entrepreneurial, brilliant, generous,
-
talented, young people.
-
They find new paths to activism,
-
for example leveraging the diversity of backgrounds
-
of second and third generation europeans
-
to make society more open.
-
They start companies to build large-scale urban games
-
that are used to reappropriate public spaces
-
and use them in new ways.
-
They move to North Sea islands
-
to explore the way small communities
-
can switch to renewable energy sources,
-
finding a new sense of purpose as they do so.
-
And they make learning easier to access
-
by launching free, peer-to-peer, online schools.
-
These people don’t work together.
-
In fact, they’ve never even met.
-
But their activities seem to be connected
-
in a coherent picture.
-
And this picture is that of
-
the world we’ll all be living in tomorrow.
-
And by the way, though you certainly can view them as successful
-
they are by a measure of success
-
that is not the same as that normally accepted
-
by the society at large.
-
Many struggle to make a living
-
or have done so as they started their journeys.
-
Just like you and me.
-
How to make a living with integrity,
-
how to live the kind of life that we want,
-
how to have a say in our communities.
-
So many people in Europe and elsewhere,
-
young and not so young,
-
are thinking very hard about these problems,
-
and that makes them - us - the experts.
-
And when you pull together a lot of experts
-
what you have is a think tank.
-
EdgeRyders wants to be
-
the largest think tank in the world
-
on the youth’s transition
-
to an independent active life.
-
How does this work?
-
Well, it starts by exploring the transition space.
-
And that means sharing what we are doing
-
as we build our lives,
-
learning from each other,
-
and figuring out together what to do next.
-
There is a gaming element.
-
Society’s typically not generous with rewards
-
for young people’s efforts,
-
but we think it’s important to honour them.
-
So we do it with points and stuff like that.
-
The second step is to aggregate
-
the individual journeys into common solutions,
-
generate a policy vision,
-
and bring it to the attention
-
of the European and national authorities.
-
The space where we do all this
-
is an interactive online platform
-
called EdgeRyders,
-
developed here at the Council of Europe,
-
based on free software.
-
EdgeRyders is designed to be scalable.
-
So whether you’re a regional government,
-
a local authority,
-
a private or third-sector organisation,
-
if you care about this problem,
-
please come see us
-
and we’ll discuss possible partnerships.
-
Meanwhile, good luck with your journey.
