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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."

March 9th 2019

Santiago de Compostela,
completely cloudy.
Illustrating empowerment

Today I’m sharing with you a situation where I think I have helped a young person to feel empowered. The case I want to talk to you about is the one of a 23-year-old young woman. She came to me because she was going through depression that had arisen in the context of her relationship with her partner. The general picture was that she was lost in all of her vital aspects: vocation, partner, residence, self-identity, control of her emotions, life prospects… So I started working with her bringing some order. To bring order is one of the most healing things there is in therapeutic work.

 

Bringing order in her family relationships, in her professional interests and vocation, in her friendships and in the reality of the town she lived in (she used to live there, but not anymore, which is an indicator of her evolution through this therapeutic work). While bringing some order, I was trying to give her some empathy favoring a space and time where she would feel heard, respected and supported.

With this understandings and with patience, she made the decisions that are, in my opinion, the indicator that she is moving towards her empowerment. The first decision was to tidy up her room. It could be considered a trivial thing, but the order in the place she lives talks, in a symbolic way, of how she is on the inside.

Another decision she made was to buy a second-hand car, which would allow her to have more independence. At a symbolic level, having her own car meant that she can take control of her life, being self-sufficient, and not to depend on her father’s or brother’s car.

She made an interesting remark not so long ago: “I feel way worse than a year ago (living in her old town), but I feel more free.” Well, she is in the middle of an emotional desintoxication, which is allowing her to know more inner spaces. These changes have occurred gradually over a year working with her. There is still a lot to cover, but she has taken the first steps and, as she puts it, “there is no turning back.”

In general, the backdrop that some of

 the young people I work with have is leaving home, finding meaning to their professional orientation, looking for job opportunities that allow them to have financial independence, solving toxic relationships with partners or family, or taking care of their physiological needs.

In my work, I make sure that I combine what I call the external and internal routes. In the external route we find aspects from the place we live and work, our vocation, health, and social relationships. The internal route consists of the attitudes, and emotional and cognitive reactions with which they face the external route.

 

We keep sharing these thoughts.

Rafa Cortés; youth therapist
#mentorship #metalearning #rafa #self_esteem