Article by Inés Villa G.
LOCALY project was not something that I really imagined myself doing. I had never worked with youngsters before, and I was a little bit worried about it in the beginning. But during and after receiving the training from Biodiversa in July 2024, I started becoming more confident, interested, and curious to give it a go in real life.
It helped me become more secure about working with young people, allowing them to share their thoughts and concerns and being able to guide them, to try and make them conscious about what is going on in the world, and how to try and make it a little bit better, especially in their locality.
Even though the search for a suitable project was not easy nor fast, every part of it was clearly important for my personal growth, learning that not everything comes as you might visualize it in the first place.
Dynamization and upgrading of the route ¨La Camocha¨ was the project that finally found its way through. The first day I contacted the coordinators of the Scout Group Keltikhé was when I realized it was the best fit for a project on this topic.
In our first session, I got to know the youngsters and I also gained a lot of hope which was lost during the long search for an organization that would provide the support with the number of youngsters needed interested in the project. This hope, came from the youngsters, that, even though it being the first time ever for me to work with them, they managed to make me feel really comfortable and very motivated to start, due to their own motivation. I got to know their worries and their concerns about their environment regarding nature, and I also got to learn about their interests, and how they may be useful to create a project. It was this very first day when they already came up with a great idea, that, brightened later, ended up being Dynamization and upgrading of the route ¨La Camocha¨.
This dynamization and upgrading we got through hiding decorated wooden boxes along the route equipped with a laminated tiny paper containing an environmental fact in a ¨Did you know…?¨ format, for people to look for them, making this route more appealing to (especially) locals, so they can have a nice time searching for them and also, learning some facts about the nature that surrounds it, such as natural elements that even if they have always been there, they might miss if they don’t stop to look twice and appreciate them.
For the success of this activity, we ¨engaged¨ or ¨signed up¨ the boxes on an online App: ¨Geocaching¨, in which people look for these ¨treasures¨ and then mark them as ¨found¨, making it more enjoyable and possible for everyone.
We also got to carry out some activities from the LOCALY toolkit. I have to say that thanks to the toolkit it was way easier for me to guide them in a more confident way. Chapter 4 was especially helpful, allowing me and them to plan everything in an easy way that would not stress us out due to the lack of time.
We got to carry out the activity ¨Find your climate superpower¨, and the ¨Systems thinking – The game¨, this last one really made them reflect on how one thing affects another and it is all really a big chain of events that can fall out any second if we don’t try and make it stable, like a domino effect.
Image 4. Screen capture of the c:geo app, showing where the boxes are hidden.
Finally, also carried out at the implementation day, I had them fill some questions for feedback. This where the following:
- What did you not like/what would you change?, in which everybody answered that the lack of time was something that they didn’t quite like, they wanted more time to make the project even better.
- What was that you liked the most?, where some of the most common answers were that they liked the whole process/ doing something productive/ doing something that is really interesting/ the implementation day.
- What did you learn?, here almost everyone answered that they learned about flora and fauna of the local area and also about the effort that it takes to do a project like this.
In conclusion, LOCALY has been a project with many ups and downs, but the final result was more than satisfactory. I also learned about the effort that it takes to do something like this right, and how to deal with youngsters and catch their attention. I can assure you that it was very self-fulfilling in the end and I am more than happy to have been a part of it.
