On June 1st, welcomed by the bright sun of Children’s Day, we opened the treasure memory box, not only of our childhood but also of our first-hand experience as quaranteens.

“Face The Challenge: Active Youth” was how we named our workshop, implementing some of the educational techniques and valuable skills we acquired during our Arezzo adventure in March 2023. We introduced the “ACTMEM project” to our audience, explaining our fundamental values, goals and methods. Then, once we got their attention, the magic entered the room and the “real deal” began…

All of us are familiar with the importance of stimulating the interaction between European institutions and organisations, so we decided to start with a short film, created by The European Commission for the “EUandME” project, called “The Shape”, directed by Jaco Van Dormael. The film depicts the importance of freedom of speech and media pluralism in an artistic and thoughtfully “layered” manner, where interpretation is subjective, complex and strongly individualistic. It set the tone for freedom, change and action, which evoked a lively dialogue between the participants and grew into a thought-provoking discussion about freedom through the perspective of COVID.

There’s no way to filter or summarize the zestful atmosphere in the room but we did our best and encouraged everyone to pick three key associations and then write them down in the Mentimeter presentation we had prepared. Using the intuitive mechanism of the platform, we narrowed down the word cloud to the three most common associations of our participants – freedom, darkness and fear. Heading from these, we decided to decipher the essence of our main project topic – COVID: a health crisis.

Our physical and mental health, seen through the perspective of an active wrestler, a person dealing with social anxiety and an artist… This is what you call a demographic palette!
Of course, we couldn’t help but wonder how the digital generation recognizes the digital health concept, prioritized by the World Health Organisation for the last few years. The interaction between the pandemic and social media, the “instant gram” of satisfaction, Tik Tok and the never-ending scroll.

Intrigued by everything that was “just the beginning”, everyone was impatient to see what was about to happen ahead in the workshop, so we didn’t leave them hanging – it was time for “The Pedro” part.

Diving deep into the concept of collective personality, inspired by the German workshop, held in Arezzo, we took our own spin on it.

All of our participants were about the same age and that led us to the thought that we wouldn’t have an impressive answer diversity (as you may already guess, we were wrong), so we decided to add another technique to the already existing one – “The Six Thinking Hats”, a method of Edward de Bono. We learned all about it, thanks to our wonderful mentor and coordinator – Violeta Stoycheva and adapted it with our other, just as wonderful, mentor – Dimitrinka Arnaudova.
The method breaks down a certain problem into six different directions (hats) and sets to interpret the problem through them, thanks to color symbolism.

Before all of that, though, we had to give our “person” a name. Shortly after we assigned the task, we had it – Zdravko ( a Bulgarian name, coming from the word “здраве”(zdrave), meaning “health”).
Following that, everyone wrote down their contribution to Zdravko’s destiny, extracted from their own autobiography. They had to choose a hat color, analogical to their story and then logically connect it to the collective personality. A high-spirited and inspiring process that created a moving outcome.

A story, swirling around the warm memories of childhood, the transition into maturity, the shock, caused by the pandemic and last but not least – the phoenix of the collective well-being, regenerated by the power of hope, community and freedom (in all of its definitions).

Rounds of applause for everyone and there comes the homework. According to what hat color each participant chose, they have to create a short video, depicting the life of a quaranteen through the prism of it and its color symbolism, which they would later upload to “StoryAP” as a contribution to “ACTMEM” and our mutual cause – keeping memories active and making people feel accepted, appreciated and belonging to a stronger community.