Hello, my name is Alberto Cottica.
I work at the Council of Europe
on a project called EdgeRyders,
it is about the transition of young people
to an independent, active life.
If you look at the data,
young europeans seem pretty much like a lost generation.
Unemployment is very high,
and what’s worse, about one person in five
is not in employment, education or training.
This does not happen only in your early twenties.
It actually gets worse as you go towards your mid-thirties.
What we’re looking at here is a general loss of autonomy
of the adult population.
The young just happen to be in the line of fire.
But that’s not the whole story.
Europe, and indeed the world,
are full of extremely entrepreneurial, brilliant, generous,
talented, young people.
They find new paths to activism,
for example leveraging the diversity of backgrounds
of second and third generation europeans
to make society more open.
They start companies to build large-scale urban games
that are used to reappropriate public spaces
and use them in new ways.
They move to North Sea islands
to explore the way small communities
can switch to renewable energy sources,
finding a new sense of purpose as they do so.
And they make learning easier to access
by launching free, peer-to-peer, online schools.
These people don’t work together.
In fact, they’ve never even met.
But their activities seem to be connected
in a coherent picture.
And this picture is that of
the world we’ll all be living in tomorrow.
And by the way, though you certainly can view them as successful
they are by a measure of success
that is not the same as that normally accepted
by the society at large.
Many struggle to make a living
or have done so as they started their journeys.
Just like you and me.
How to make a living with integrity,
how to live the kind of life that we want,
how to have a say in our communities.
So many people in Europe and elsewhere,
young and not so young,
are thinking very hard about these problems,
and that makes them - us - the experts.
And when you pull together a lot of experts
what you have is a think tank.
EdgeRyders wants to be
the largest think tank in the world
on the youth’s transition
to an independent active life.
How does this work?
Well, it starts by exploring the transition space.
And that means sharing what we are doing
as we build our lives,
learning from each other,
and figuring out together what to do next.
There is a gaming element.
Society’s typically not generous with rewards
for young people’s efforts,
but we think it’s important to honour them.
So we do it with points and stuff like that.
The second step is to aggregate
the individual journeys into common solutions,
generate a policy vision,
and bring it to the attention
of the European and national authorities.
The space where we do all this
is an interactive online platform
called EdgeRyders,
developed here at the Council of Europe,
based on free software.
EdgeRyders is designed to be scalable.
So whether you’re a regional government,
a local authority,
a private or third-sector organisation,
if you care about this problem,
please come see us
and we’ll discuss possible partnerships.
Meanwhile, good luck with your journey.