Youth Exchange "European Talents" , Peniche - Portugal

The logo of the Youth Exchange

One of the best experiences that I had, was my participation as Youth Leader in the Youth Exchange European Talents in Portugal  (for more about what is a Youth Exchange read here)


Peniche is a small city connected to the ocean as it is surrounded by the sea and the majority of the citizens are or fishermen or are occupied in the tourist sector.

Fishermen in Peniche

The Youth Exchange, a quite significant and nice event for the small town,  took part from 16th to 24th of March , bringing together 40 youngsters from Belgium, Italy , Poland and Portugal!

The participants of the Youth Exchange

The Youth Exchange's topic were the arts, connected to the issue of social network. The main idea of the project was the participants to reflect upon the use of social media in their lives, their pros and cons and to use them as an inspiration to do a public performance of theatre, dance and music presentations.


The APV, the preparation phase and my role

Some typical products from Italy!

As the Youth Leader of the Italian team, I went to the preparatory visit (APV) in Peniche a month before the Youth Exchange, in order to meet the organisation -Associação Juvenil de Peniche, plan the program with the activities, discuss upon the rules and other logistic issues and of course see the city. My role was to pass all this information to the Italian participants preparing them in this way for the experience that they would have in Portugal.As far as  the 5-persons team was formulated, we met 2 times and we discussed also about the presentation that we would have to do once in Peniche: about the social network in Italy! Creativity was the key: due to the fact that many of the Italias weren't speaking English, we decided to do a short theatre of 5-10 minutes explaining the evolution of the communication in Italy . We also manage to coordinate ourselves about the Intercultural night , a night that was dedicated to Italy and we could bring traditional food, show videos that represent the country and in general let the others know about the italian culture in a relaxed easy-going way, without studying books or boring PowerPoint Presentations!

The Youth Exchange

The participants of the theatre workshop in action

After some ice-breakers, energisers and the name games in order the participants to be able to remember (at least!) the group was divided in workshops : dance, theatre, music, painting and media and everybody worked together so to create a final performance that was presented to the citizens of the town.

The painting group

Surfing in Peniche

Happily, I can say that I was the "facilitator" of the theatre group, where I helped the youngsters to work together, discover what they want to offer the team and make the process easier for them, as sometimes language problems were significant between the communication of the group.





After the successful performance of the group, and the final evaluation of the project, we all had some free time to relax and what best to do some surf in the city that organises the World Surf Championship every year?