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"This is one of the cases in which a pilot project went beyond our expectations" states the letter that Agnès Monfret, Head of the Communication Unit at the Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policies (DG-REGIO) of the European Commission, has addressed to the Head of the Department for Cohesion Policies Ferdinando Ferrara, on the occasion of the formal conclusion of the pilot project "At the School of OpenCohesion" .
In fact, in the school years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021, the ASOC project (which has been active in Italy since 2013) expanded to Europe, involving in particular teams of students in Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Portugal and Spain.
Despite the pandemic emergency, the educational path continued thanks to the "digital" focus of the project and a methodology organized in modules, steps and progressive objectives (with the support provided by the ASOC central staff, including new vademecum and guidelines aimed at increasing the use of digital tools for remote work).
Mrs. Monfret acknowledges in her letter the ability "to quickly adapt the activities and complete the project with exceptional results, involving students from different schools in different regions of the countries involved", facing at the same time also "a context that has been totally and dramatically changed by the pandemic" .
“The feedback we have received from Spain, Bulgaria, Greece and Croatia on the quality of the project and your leadership leave no doubt about its success,” writes Monfret.
There are 240 classes throughout Europe (including Italy) involved in the 2020-2021 school year. "There are not many projects that can count on such a large commitment of youth”, underlines the Head of Communication of DG-REGIO.
She concludes: “ASOC EU is a model that we hope will be taken up by other European regions in the years to come. The idea of providing young people with tools for practical learning about what cohesion policies are is particularly important in 2022, the European Year of Youth. For our part, we are committed to collaborate in order to ensure this model is replicated and promoted not only in the countries already involved in the pilot project, but also enlarged in other contexts".
For further information: “At the School of OpenCohesion”: the European project
