We were born as group during the participation in Youth Act Seminar in Madrid. We were a group of youth with dreams, with ambitions, with visions but above all with the will to participate, collaborate with a change. We started to let the other change us. To see the energy of other youth, the empowerment, the frenetic ideas, the possibilities to help and improve the communities we live in were beautiful signs for us to start our enrolment with EDIW and became Youth Act Lisbon.

Our belief is the promotion of an active posture towards the diverse challenges of our society. We are focused on learning with each other, since we are a heterogeneous group from diverse areas – science, politics, economics, history, education. Our diversity is at the core of our origin! We formed this group with the aim to build a space to know how to identify the problems we want to address, to dissect them and finally came up with ideas, solutions, and actions.

We conducted some sessions in Lisbon and online to promote our critical thinking about different topics: News and Information, Communication in pandemic times, Citizenship and Participation, Democratic Values, and Inclusion. As a first approach we aimed to discuss the topics, brainstorm, and research about them. As an ultimate goal we desire to promote social awareness actions and include the community in our activities. We faced many challenges: explain people what our group is, attract more youth and reach the minorities we want to embrace in our project. We are particularly interested in including homeless people and children with learning difficulties in our activities. We were able to identify these groups and their corresponding needs as well as the way we could contribute for the promotion of inclusion, personal development, and social participation.

We are still growing and exploring our tools to turn them useful for the other. We want more than belong: we want to participate; do more than care: help; do more than dream: work. @ediw_lisbon.