Building bridges to strengthen communities and foster imagination

Lesvos and Sicily have a lot in common; the two Mediterranean islands geographically disconnected from the mainland shared a past of conquests, dominations, and civilization-clashes that enriched their territories and expanded their horizons.

They are sharing the challenges of the Present connoted by the economic crisis, challenges of migration and high rate of youth unemployment, as well as an image of the Future made of rising walls around Europe, closed borders and ports.

This project opposes this idea of the future with rising walls by building bridges instead.

Literally. We are going to build a bridge between Sicily and Lesvos.

The physical construction of the Bridge will never happen; it’s a Fictional Game that serves to encourage people to be bold and ambitious, to have a common goal to look forward to and to explore the generating power of their collective wisdom and imagination.

By aiming for the radical, the less radical turns into something quite rational, such as taking part in the labor market, taking a step towards entrepreneurship or simply to believe more in their skills and potential.

The project is a pioneering approach that tackles the need for social innovation of the communities around the world.

The main target group consists of 5–20 people, both in Mytilene (Lesvos) and Palermo (Sicily), that identify themselves within the definition of the ‘lost generation’: young people that are struggling in record numbers to find work, leave home, and start a family. Namely, people that are unemployed (or at risk of), that lack self-confidence in their skills or talents, that are facing the challenges of today’s job market.

The Bridge Project aims to connect the community at large, within the inhabitants of the single islands and between the 2 islands; Therefore, there is the will to include everyone who wants to participate in the construction of the Bridge during the workshop.

The goal of the project is to foster participants’ soft and hard skills, boost their attitude and self-confidence, reinforce an interdisciplinary exchange and spread the web of connections and networking possibilities.

The story

We started planning The Bridge Project during PUSH. and CREATIVE HUB’s participation in Tandem’s Partner Forum in Sofia, in February 2019.

Tandem Europe is tailor-made for people who work on creative solutions that make social innovation possible throughout the EU. The program stimulates strategic thinking in organizational renewal processes, helps to create and sustain culturally innovative effects across sectors, disciplines, and borders, and explores creative and collaborative solutions for contemporary challenges in our societies.

* Tandem Europe is an initiative developed by European Cultural Foundation and MitOst e.V.. together with Fondazione Cariplo with additional financial support from Robert Bosch Stiftung and Stavros Niarchos Foundation. It is implemented together with 4iS (Aveiro), COMM’ON (Athens) and Ideas Factory (Sofia).

PUSH and CREATIVE HUB started the process of contacting and attracting people from the main target groups through their existing networks of associations, NGO’s, and local communities. Part of The Bridge Project ’s mission to enlarge the engagement of people through different channels built by the participants to the workshop.

The construction workshops

The Bridge Project consists of a “construction workshop” that will happen in Palermo and in Mytilene. The activities performed in the two workshops have a common structure and involve the main target groups. The aim of the project is to foster the communication, exchange, creativity, confidence, and coordination of the participants in the process of building the Bridge. The workshops are based on horizontal skill-development that will allow them to autonomously organize the next workshops that consist of more technical and thematic appointments such as masterclasses of professionals, themed workshops (fundraising, design, materials, communication), design sprints, management skills, co-creation workshops and more.