What it is about
Be Your Hero is the educational format created by Sineglossa to train soft skills, everyone’s “superpowers”, through experimental activities such as art workshops or Art du Déplacement, a discipline of physical movement in urban space with no scores and no winners. From 3 to 6 September 2026 the campus took place in Mesagne, in the province of Brindisi, as part of Bella storia. La tua, the programme run by Fondazione Unipolis, in collaboration with Cooperativa Stella Maris. The campus brought together 23 young people aged 14 to 20: teenagers living in residential care communities, young people on restorative justice pathways and unaccompanied foreign minors. The local area became part of the experience through three meetings: with the association La Manovella; with Libera Puglia, who spoke about assets confiscated from organised crime and education in lawfulness; and with Spazio D’Autore, a bookshop and vinyl record store.
Be Your Hero in vulnerable contexts: Lucca and Milan
Over the past two years, Be Your Hero has increasingly worked in vulnerable contexts. In Lucca, in May 2025, we ran the first campus with unaccompanied foreign minors. There, we had to shift to a language that was more visual than verbal. In July 2026, in Milan, the methodology worked for the first time with women survivors of violence, together with SVS Donna Aiuta Donna. Each of these experiences taught us something, and in Mesagne the lesson learnt in Lucca became a specific design choice.
How we redesigned the journal
For the Mesagne group we set aside the journal, the analogue tool used in the Be Your Hero methodology to share reflections on oneself and on others. In its place, we introduced a team game. Reflection on soft skills remained, but it happened through shared experience and mutual observation rather than through writing.
“In Lucca we noticed that the journal, which is normally one of the most effective tools in Be Your Hero, could become a barrier for some of the young people: it required language skills and a familiarity with writing that we could not take for granted. In Mesagne we started from this observation to redesign that part of the programme. We turned the work on soft skills into a collective game in which, day by day, with a game board, a single counter and a shared goal, the participants were able to practise Be Your Hero’s superpowers together. The young people had to start from concrete episodes, recognising when a member of their team had put a particular skill into practice; if they could not identify it, the other groups could recognise it for them.”
– Tommaso Sorichetti, Be Your Hero trainer
The same principle guided our recent work on the Be Your Hero archetypes, reimagined as animal figures: the Octopus, the Albatross, the Ram, the Bee and the Otter. The key word in that work was “legibility”: do participants immediately understand what they are looking at? Can they use it to tell their own story? When a tool, whether writing or an image, becomes an obstacle, we change it, so that the goal remains within everyone’s reach. For the young people in Mesagne, this meant recognising one another as a “Guardian Angel” or a “Fighter” through the game, without having to face a blank page.
