THE SEEDS EXPERIENCE ACCORDING TO THE PROTAGONISTS: Interview with Simona Cerrato

Simona Cerrato, the Communication Manager of ECSA in the SEEDS project, shared her experience with us. 

Teens are often considered a “difficult to reach” audience: “Nothing more wrong than this!”according to Simona. To involve teens, SEEDS adopted specific strategies: “We used this special event called makeathon. Teenagers were invited to this kind of very creative event. They were asked to perform some tasks but without any foreseen results. So, the topics were defined and more or less the structure of the day but nobody was able to foresee what was the result. Everything of the SEEDS project, including the interventions done in schools later on, were devised by teenagers in this makeathon event. They immediately understood that this was a safe place for them, where they could express their voices and be listened to. So, I think this was the key to involvement for many of them and it was successful.”

Simona’s advice to someone who wants to work with teenagers is the following: “First of all to consider them as people and not as someone who is just doing nothing or staying all day in front of a screen and losing their time and so on. They are people with a vision of the future and with some brilliant ideas. Many of them are experts in some fields and they really do normally a good job in life. They have a lot of interest and if you take them seriously and if you stop and step back and try to listen to them I think it is a good opportunity to learn a lot and also to get back to your age: when you were yourself a teenager and you experienced the same feeling of a change. Maybe not understanding what is going on, not understanding what you are going to do in life and nobody is willing to accompany you in this pass. So, I think the first thing is to step back, listen to them and take them seriously.”