Even in these hectic days, with the first courses starting off together with our first public events, SOS keeps on weaving its thick web of relationship, fundamental to keep a high quality, alive, entropic and dynamic community.
On January 17th we have been in Milan, hosted by CheFare, to formally end the mentoring path following our victory of the CheFare 2015 grant, the award that allowed us to start our beautiful adventure off and to which we owe everything that’s happening right now in Bari.
We were there together with the other two grant winners: Tournée da Bar, bringing theatrical plays in bars, re-connecting the noble art with a younger or usually distant public, far away from more formal stages, and Baumhaus, a collective that connects the recovery of young people coming from less privileged situations with their education and training through production, development and distribution of artistic work on an international scale.
Guided by CheFare’s Bertram Niessen and Federica Vittori (both were also teachers in our XYZ co-creation labs held in July 2016), we drew the conclusions of this year of beginnings and ambitions, assessing the mentoring program and mainly focusing on the next challenges:
organization, growth, partnerships.
After a moment with winners and participants of the Grant’s previous rounds - many of which showed sincere interest towards SOS, in some cases already drafting some collaboration ideas - the day ended with the introduction of the three winning projects in front of a large audience of students, researchers, practitioners and curious, each of them introduced by an external “friend” picked by CheFare. We’ve had the pleasure of being introduced by Annibale D’Elia, one of the responsibles of Regione Puglia’s Bollenti Spiriti youth policies program, also inventing the Laboratori dal Basso (bottom-up workshops) format which allowed some of our founders to have their first experiences with, first, the ‘X’ lab in 2013, followed by the ‘XY’ lab in 2014 - where it all began.
The whole day has been an excellent opportunity for us to assess how our project is the result of a constant interaction with community and territory, full of food for thought around La Scuola Open Source’s future; a future that - even judging by the audience’s enthusiasm - can be foreseen as frenetic and exciting like never before.
We feel obliged and happy to thank CheFare for their support and their constant push to improve, which never lacked during this first year of work: we now can’t wait to host you again in our medieval tower “Isolato47” in the Old Town of Bari, working together on new initiatives around culture and innovation, in front of a crunchy slice of focaccia and a beer, more and more convinced that the road that lies ahead is the right one, for all of us.
