With “Trame Mediterranee” (Mediterranean Woven Tales), TRED’s students in Pollica.
Since 1999, every year, August 12 has been International Youth Day, established by the United Nations General Assembly to call on the world to implement policies that help young people overcome increasingly complex challenges, to support them in this process, and above all to remind everyone of their (fundamental) role as drivers of change. Today, as we close this critical Day, I want to tell you about what has happened in the last few months in our natural incubator of seeds of change: the Paideia Campus, which for four years now has come to life in the heart of the Lands of the Mediterranean Diet (Terre della Dieta Mediterranea), a unique place in the world, an educating territory where ecological consciousness with millenary roots has become a natural incubator of what we like to call the “longevity algorithm”. A Campus where innovative educational models for integral human formation are experimented with starting from consciousness (mindfulness) and “Prosperity Thinking”. Evolutionary, transformative experiences made of encounters with great visionaries (stewards, janitor farmers, and fishermen, entrepreneurs, creatives, scientists, artists, designers); and immersive experiences to experience firsthand “good practices” and concrete challenges capable of training mindset and skills to true integral ecological development, connecting soul-body-mind with the essential and the Earth.
The Paideia Campus, under the direction of the Future Food Institute, welcomes more than 2,000 young people a year to Pollica (including boot camps, summer schools, educational trips, courses for teachers and school leaders, executive programs, master’s programs, and international programs), but in 2023 it also initiated an immersive program dedicated to students in the High Schools of Applied Sciences for Ecological and Digital Transition (TRED). This four-year education pathway combines the humanistic and scientific tradition of the Italian High School (the traditional one) with the essential knowledge to actively address the digital and ecological transition. An educational path that focuses on developing technical and scientific skills — increasingly useful for future professions — while integrating them with enhancing emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, empathy, and communication. A school choice that already denotes the deep and stubborn resolve of many boys and girls to build a future different from the one we have built for them.
In May and June, TRED students from all over Italy chose Pollica, Cilento, the land of Parmenides, to learn in the field what it means to grow following a model of integral ecological development; to see with their own eyes how the union of science and creativity, of ancient knowledge and vision, can concretely reverse course in favor of the well-being of our Earth; to understand how essential it is to focus on being, on interiority, to act with awareness in caring for others and the ecosystem that welcomes us.