July News from the Youth Section at the Goetheanum

Dear friends of the Youth Section Worldwide,

We hope you are all having a wonderful summer or winter break, depending on where you are located on planet Earth! In this newsletter we want to share with you, before we take a short (summer) break, what we have coming up in the next months.

We will "close" the academic year by hosting an open call for anyone interested in our Research School (open call Saturday 24 July, program starts September). The following weekend we will join the Goetheanum Stage and the Agriculture Section at the Goetheaum for Faust and "Rejuvenating the Earth" (30 July - 4 August), a joint youth conference and Faust performance. In September, we will have the third meeting for Young Members of the School of Spiritual Science (2-5 September) in Dornach to work on the Class Lessons given by Rudolf Steiner in 1924. You are also welcome to join us in Dornach for "Frage! Begegne! Spiele!" (11-17 October) a week-long collaborative theatre-making experience. And finally, this year's events will come to a close at the Questions of Belonging Colloquium (4 - 5 December), where we will co-create with you a weekend-long process (online and in-person at different locations) on questions of identity and belonging.

Aside from all these upcoming events, we are also happy to announce that a new research project has now begun at the Youth Section in collaboration with Sassen and Richthof, Münzinghof and Altenschlirf living and working communities.

We are also looking forward to continuing our monthly gatherings with the other co-workers of the Youth Section Worldwide, which by now has groups in 25 different countries around the globe. In this newsletter, you can also see some news from our colleagues in Colombia, Georgia and Mexico, as well as from our friends at the World Social Initiative Forum.

Although things remain uncertain for most of us still, we hope that you are finding your feet in these ever-changing, unique times we live in. If you ever want to get in touch to share your experiences, questions and initiatives, we would be delighted to hear from you!

With warm greetings from the Goetheanum,

Andrea de la Cruz, Gaia Termopoli, Ioana Viscrianu
and Johannes Kronenberg with Constanza Kaliks

The Youth Section at the Goetheanum Team

The Youth Section would like to invite young people and organisations to take part in Frage! Begegne! Spiel!. The programme will take place from the 11th till the 17th of October, 2021 at the Goetheanum, Switzerland. The event is aimed at young people (age group of 16 to 28 years old) from different countries and cultural backgrounds who have questions about identity and interest in co-creating artistically. Throughout the one week-programme, a theatre performance will be developed gradually through the collective work of the group in accumulating biographical stories and reflections on questions of diversity, one's own identity and encounters and challenges that we sometimes face as young people. We will work with drama, music and stage design.

As unique spiritual beings, each of us shares the experience of belonging to certain human conditions that, restricting as they may seem, ultimately support us in how we shape our individual destinies on Earth. How we relate to our physical – racial, sexual, gender – attributes, as well as our cultural, national backgrounds inform us in our path of self-knowledge and becoming.

This colloquium attempts to give an open space for young people to articulate their own questions about aspects of the human identity and to observe what happens between us when we think these questions through.

The Colombian Youth Section was created as a space for exploration where young people can express their questions, strivings and initiatives. A space where they can share and exchange thoughts, ideas and feelings with the intention of developing and strengthening the concerns that each one of them carries within themselves.

Our intention is to be a space that allows and encourages individual exploration while providing accompaniment and opportunities for encounters between different perspectives, where each person participates and contributes from their experience, their knowledge and from the questions that motivate their search. The Section will then be a means of promoting and exhibiting initiatives that encourage the development of a society that is sensitive, ethical and aware of its relationship with the world, its main objective being to bring about social transformation through the joint work of young people.

Anthroposophy is the philosophical path that guides the Section because it remains current and promotes dialogue with the present challenges, as well as being an epistemological basis for the soul-spiritual strengthening of young people and, finally, appreciates each individuality as the agent who decides to develop his or her process of becoming more conscious.

Young people are the protagonists due to their awareness of contemporary challenges. It will be their impulse, action and self-education that will propose ways to find solutions to these challenges. So they constitute the spaces, meetings, conferences and research.

It is a Section guided towards a path of hope, of letting our hearts burn for what we are passionate about, cultivating in them a vision of how we can transform life through the everyday.

"We want to be a space in which individual questions are developed in search of answers that can be extended to many, where there is space for those who wish to contribute and propose, so that a collective network of knowledge, feelings, concerns and search for answers is woven, always growing, always transforming and taking new directions, according to the context and our intentions. Miguela Castano

"A Section where there will be a single heart, with a single rhythm and a single beat; a meeting place where we can share what we are, without pretending to be more, just giving ourselves, just looking for a common good that leads us to human and spiritual growth.
Alejandra Hernández

"It is a meeting place, where young people can appreciate diverse personal searches, where they can reach the figure of dissent and in this concept of diversity and difference can establish a space for social construction, as well as a community focused on being together, being together because we long for change and our will and perseverance will be responsible for manifesting the change. Harry Zarate

How was the idea born?
COVID-19 pandemic created a totally new reality and challenged countries all over the world. Exactly this process was the trigger to think about our country’s social, economic, cultural state and realize that they clearly became major issues. When looking deeper into the matter, we saw that the most important issue today is the low level of education in youth. In 2018, Programme for International Student Assessment – PISA published a report, which revealed that the level of education in Georgia was below average. This result was worse than in the previous (2015) report.
Moreover, remote learning has made the situation even worse, it made the learning process more lifeless and uninteresting.

What are the mission and the goal of the project?
Our mission is to provide the youth living in the village with access to quality education and help them fulfill their potential.
The goal of the project is to create an educational space, which will provide support to regular schools and provide beneficiaries with alternative education

How to achieve this goal?
We believe in order to achieve our goal we need to start by building an educational space in the village Matsevani where local young children will have the chance to study science, humanitarian, technical and art subjects.

What has been done till now to make the project happen?

For the last year, we formed a strong connection with the local people, especially with children. This is giving us the possibility to better determine our goals and find out the needs of these people.

Parallel to this we’re working with several local young children, analyzing “Faust”, even more, together we’re getting ready to attend the conference at the Goetheanum named: “Faust – Die Erde verjüngen / Rejuvenate the Earth”.

We have communication with different funds and we actively collaborate with friend organizations.

We’ve already bought land of 1500 m2 with our own finances where we’re building the educational space and we’ve also collected 7,800 US $ with group members’ own resources.

What do we need now?

The whole budget for realizing the project is 62,337 US $. We can collect this financial resource only by involving different partners, funds, and individuals in the project.

For this time, we have collected 7,800 US $, which means we need 54,537 US $ more.

Any amount of money donated by you will be a huge help in making this project fully happen.

Living in Between Spaces is an invitation to enter into an exploration of the vitality and potential of what lives within us, between us, and around us. Through keynote and panel discussions streamed online and in-presence Regional Summit Hubs, we will discuss the pressing issues of our time, such as upholding our freedom as individuals, fostering equality as a global community, and nurturing service in economy. With shared conversations on Social Threefolding and Climate Action, as well as open dialogues on Leadership, Vulnerability, and Commitment, we trust that we can respond to the serious wake-up call of our time.