Where are we now?
2016 will be remembered as one of the most important years in the last few decades, or maybe of the century. For a lot of people it resembled a weird, scary dream. For others, it was a year of victory and change. It definitely isn’t a year anyone can be unaffected by, and, even if you are one of the many who thought it was a terrible year, it seems to have motivated people to get involved; to do something for the rest of the world, to stop being idle. Go Think Initiative is a child of 2016.
Go Think started off as an idea from our director Odessa Primus, who, for years, has alternated political science studies with a series of volunteer trips in different parts of the world to help in the effort to aid the refugee crisis.
As Odessa puts it:
The information portrayed by the media and public just wasn’t correct, and it isn’t fair to the realities of so many human lives, and it isn’t fair to the public, who live under misinterpretation, vulnerable to ‘alternative’ information.
On my side, I have been working for more than a decade both as a journalist and a filmmaker, and one of my main focuses has been the relationship between technology and the way we connect with each other through it. And recently, I had a hunch:
We are now living through the most radical change in human history since the invention of the printing press.
And I think we need better tools to go through this change.
I grew up during the Internet revolution, I have seen it change all aspects of the human experience, but I still think that most people underplay how radical this specific change is, and that is starting to become clear only in the past few years; many people thought 2016 was an odd year, and look with concern at the state of affair of the world today, trying to look at it as if it’s repeating some of the warning signs of the past (the articles foreshadowing a new world war after Brexit and Trump victories have been widely shared). But this is one of the times in our history where the past is a poor guide. We are entering a completely new era, and we have to rethink our playbook.
The Go Think project, among other things, understands that a world in constant change requires new skills, paramount among which is the skill to understand, read and be able to react to change. Humans are built to adapt, but they are not built to do this as quickly as modern technologies compel us to; so it’s on us to develop strategies to keep up.
Our main focus will be to offer and develop courses, workshops and seminars to have people (especially young people) gain the tools to understand the way their own countries work, the way they can impact them as citizens, and to keep doing that for decades. We understand that many programs offer a jolt of energy that shortly fades away after the program is over. We aim to promote continuous, sustainable engagement in civil life.
We are developing a wide array of programs to reach this result: some of them are strictly focused on teaching the way the state works, the way politics work, because we have detected a severe problem with the way basic civic education is implemented in most schools. On the other hand, we are also aware that the tools needed to understand the world around us are also changing. If literacy, not long ago, was focused on the spoken and written world, today being literate requires more skills; it requires understanding video production, photography, and design. We want to develop courses that keep this new reality in mind, to make sure the people we work with read reality in the best way possible.
In this blog, along with articles about the topics we are passionate about, we want to explore and tell a story surrounding Go Think Initiative. We think that in order to figure out where to go from here we need to share our projects, but also our experiences in making things work, the challenges, the inspirations, the achievements. People interested in doing this kind of work might find ways to relate, compare and find new strategies; and others might be able to gain a sense of how making a project like this can work.
Emilio Bellu, Go Think Initiative Vice-Chairman.
