January 2nd, 2019

         I work as a youth technician at the Vall d’en Bas Town Hall; a scattered municipality, a town of towns. The main challenge we face is that most young people come into contact with each other only in the context of formal education, i.e. at school or high school, and there is little contact outside this context. This makes it difficult to work with them outside of this background, and our department is trying to provide meeting and learning spaces that make different social contexts possible. For example, we have a studio for radio programmes and a multimedia space where they can get together to work or play with the computer. I see that our role, as

municipal education technicians, has to focus on creating these meeting spaces and working on personal interaction and the creation of relationships in order to foster collective empowerment. 

Even so, collective empowerment starts with individual empowerment, so we also have to work on giving young people the ability to make decisions for themselves.

One of the things we are doing is organising educational meetups that bring together the seven municipalities in the Valley. We want it to be a meetup led by our youth and aimed at children aged 6 to 12 years old. Personally, I think that participating in an educational meetup promotes individual empowerment: adhering and

transmitting the values of leisure, responsibility in front of children, connection with people from other generations… All of this makes you see that people have a very important role in relation to others and that we have to be able to play it.

I think that the work I do with young people is not easy. It would be very easy if I limited myself to a strict activity schedule without exercising my responsibility to transmit values and educate them. The first step towards achieving this is to become a positive referent. Sometimes I have the feeling that when a young person looks at an adult, they see them as sad, gloomy and full of problems… How do I present myself to my kids? What does my frenetic lifestyle transmit them?

What is our attitude like when we interact with them? If we show dreariness, young people will not connect with adults and it is important that they do. If we show happiness and joy, the connection happens almost instantly. The attitude with which we exercise our referentiality has to be joyful. Empowerment has to be happy, joyful and rhythmical.

As education technicians, the issue of empowerment must always be on the table. Education and empowerment are two inseparable concepts. One makes no sense without the other. Sometimes we ignore this issue or do not take it into account, as well as the issue of attitude. We must always remember this before we start work, because young people are the future, but they are also the present,

and the present is tackled through small, day-to-day actions.

We are not essential to young people; we are someone who is there and who has coincided with them in a vital moment. We have to give everything that is in us in order to leave a positive mark and connect with them. If they have a good memory of us, we will probably influence them, become a referent and contribute to their empowerment.

Sometimes we think that adults have the key to everything, but we don’t have the key to anything. We all have the key (adults, young people, children…). What we need to know is how to assign these keys to the right doors. Adults have to know how to leave aside the keys and teach, not because we have studied or 

stopped studying, but because we have already experienced things, we have already gone through those doors or similar doors and we have to show them the way.