Among the most interesting tools that the Erasmus+ programme makes available to the youth sector is the possibility, for networks funded under Key Action 3 “European Youth Together” (KA3), to redistribute part of their resources through open calls aimed at informal groups of young people. This is a mechanism that allows an idea born in a suburban square to become an action funded by a European programme. This is exactly what happened in Guidonia, in the province of Rome, where an informal group of young people, supported by L’isola che c’è APS, responded to the call launched by the FLYE project by proposing a series of three events designed to give the community back a meeting space that, quite simply, no longer existed. 

The starting point was the needs of local young people. Guidonia, a municipality of over 90,000 inhabitants in the Rome metropolitan area, shares many of the dynamics typical of first-ring towns: rapid urban growth, fragmentation of the social fabric across different settlements, and a shortage of stable spaces dedicated to young people. It is in this context that a group of young people from the area identified the problem clearly: there are no real, non-sporadic opportunities to come together, express themselves, and be heard by those who actually decide policy. 

The FLYE call asked applicant groups to translate a local need into a concrete participation pathway, one managed by young people themselves rather than simply designed “for” them. The call received several project proposals, four of which were shortlisted and put to a direct vote by young people via Instagram, a democratic process that made it possible to select the one with the broadest support. 

The winning project, “Fuori dal Fosso”, framed its overall goal in terms consistent with this approach: reactivating a public space in Guidonia as a place of intergenerational encounter, and building, through three complementary actions, a pathway that would bring together sociability, creative expression, non-violent conflict management in sport, and access to local employment opportunities. Three specific objectives guided the design process: giving visibility to forms of youth expression often unrecognised by traditional cultural policies (urban music, in particular); using sport as a training ground for communication rather than mere competition; and bringing young people into direct contact with the area’s productive and associative fabric, with a focus on employability rather than simple guidance. 

In practical terms, the group worked in stages: mapping local stakeholders who might be interested (sports clubs, music collectives, small businesses and trade associations), and building a programme that wove the three actions into a single narrative framework. 

The first event, aggregative in nature, served as an “opening”, a sports tournament with a strong focus on non-violent communication. The second event, a freestyle rap competition, drew on a language directly generated by young people to give them centre stage, so urban music becomes here the tool through which identity, voice, and the ability to perform on a stage in front of a jury and a local audience are put on display. 

With the third event, the “job fair,” the tone shifted: less performative, more focused on direct encounters between local businesses and organisations and the young people of the area, in a logic of proximity intended to address the broader issue of youth employability, itself a central theme of the EU Youth Strategy. 

The most immediate impact of a project like this will be measured over time, through a range of factors spanning from the physical and symbolic reactivation of a space the community had stopped experiencing as its own, to the creation of work-related synergies rooted in the local area. 

The process, highly democratic in nature, is in any case a positive one in terms of active citizenship, because it allowed an informal group, with no prior experience managing European funds, to acquire new skills and to mobilise locally for the common good. 

This, precisely, is the systemic logic behind the “Youth Together” networks and the FLYE project, in particular  translating local initiatives rooted in young people’s active participation into concrete action.