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Climb up wherever you are. Your path is like a scrapbook, a handful of pages to revisit, decisions made, inadvertent high scores and lucky mistakes. What factors have brought you to where you are?

Orbital Logbooks allows you to browse through a collage of impressions that ten professionals from the field of education have collected over the course of a year in their field journals.

The journey is an infinite, circular itinerary, which we encourage you to follow as you like so that you lose yourself in the different stages that make up the landscape of empowerment.

Orbital logbooks
Empowerment is a continuous, infinite journey. The circle you will see next aims to be its representation. In it are situated, in the form of coloured circumferences, the different stages of the empowerment process that ten professionals in the field of education have defined with their thoughts and reflections. By selecting them, you will be able to see what stage they refer to and you will discover the materials made to describe it.

The different colours correspond to three types of resources:
The green circumferences contain pages from field journals.
The orange ones, audio-visual pieces on specific topics, recorded by the educators themselves.
The yellow ones contain fragments of four focus groups where participants shared experiences.

Through these materials, you will be able to delve into the meaning of a term as abstract and multifaceted as that of youth empowerment; circulating through its stages, from prior reflection to the evaluation of the results obtained.

In the menu on the top right, you can learn more about the project and also access an archive of the materials, where you can filter them by specific concepts and interests.
This page has been elaborated following the recommendations of the use of non-sexist language. Therefore, as far as possible, we have used generic expressions that include gender diversity.
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"My name is Rafa Cortés. I have been working with young people since I was young, for over twenty years. I have always been linked to the field of education and associationism and, for the past 8 years, also, in the field of psychotherapy. I currently work as a therapist specializing in youth and as a teacher in the Axioma Association, of which I am a founding member, and in the leisure time education school Escola Lliure el Sol.

I have a degree in sociology from the UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona), I have a Master's degree in Youth and Society from the UdG (University of Girona) and training in Axiometry with Janine Rodiles, Family Constellations with Marta Albadalejo Mur, Music Therapy with Jordi Delclós and Theatre-Clowning with Pau Rosell.

Being able to accompany young people in their growth and healing processes fills me with satisfaction."

May 10th 2019
Context and family

 

Today I will reflect on how the context influences young people’s empowerment. First of all, a clarification on the influence of the context. One of my starting points in my therapeutic work is from a Catalan saying “there is no bad wind for a good sailor”, meaning that everything is up to the attitude we have to face what happens to us.

From that point of view, the context in which they live in is secondary, since the main point is the attitudes they develop, which are, in my opinion, where empowerment lies.

Therefore, the role context plays is that of putting the ingredients in order to work at an inner level, where, I insist, lies the true value of a person. Focusing on context, the factor that has a bigger impact on a person’s development is family. In my experience, the relationship young people have had and have with their families strongly determines their self-esteem, their ability to take responsibility, their ability to find a place in this world, to have a clear idea of what they want, being self-sufficient, etc. All of this has to do with the affective relationship they have had with their parents.

 In general, besides family, the other key elements that have an impact on their empowerment are their partners (if they

have one), their friends, their work, and their studies.

About their studies, I’m surprised how badly they are left with the overload of work and exams they are subjected to, so that they end up extremely stressed.

I find that this overload that many carry, restricts them, and doesn’t allow them to enjoy their friends, what they want after finishing their studies, and even building a relationship with their partners.   

 

We will continue.

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#community_identity #family #friendship #mentorship #rafa