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About the news
BE YOUR HERO – the educational format conceived by Sineglossa to train life skills of young people and adults through Art Du Déplacement and soft skills – has met for the first time a group of unaccompanied underage youths. From the 7th to the 10th of May 2025, we conducted a special edition of the project in Lucca with the help of Fondazione Unipolis, within the framework of Bella storia. La tua program. It is thanks to the collaboration with the project GRANDE! Giovani stRanieriAccompagnati Nei percorsi Di InclusionE, an integrated intervention model that allows unaccompanied foreign minors about to turn 18 (UFM) and ex-UFM in administrative provisions to deal with the passage from a safe context to autonomy. A particular acknowledgment goes to COSPE and the whole staff of volunteers of the Centro Nazionale per il Volontariato di Lucca.
The activity with unaccompanied foreign minors
For the first time, the Be Your Hero campus involved a group of vulnerable individuals, specifically a group of 20 unaccompanied minors, with a migrant background.
Saying migrant background (or "experience") means many different things: it means people that came to Italy on their own, pushed by their desires or by those of their community of origin (or both), oftentimes following dangerous, psychologically challenging and dehumanizing routes only to end up in a path that’s highly bureaucratic. Sometimes it means illiteracy, low capacity to keep your attention on something, not exercising, not being able to feel your body or your mind, being addicted to your smartphone to hear your language, or to see videos of your friends from a distant life. It means people put into administrative provisions until they’re 18 and then left on their own, with the danger of becoming illegal immigrants and being returned to their country of origin if they don’t manage to find a job or a place to stay.
Adapting the methodology
The Be Your Hero method combines Art Du Déplacement, a non-competitive sport, with a shared reflection on soft skills, beginning from the observation of those trained during physical exercise. To allow participants from different countries (Albania, Burkina Faso, Egypt, The Gambia, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Senegal) to communicate, some tools of this method have been modified, favoring visual language over the verbal one.
Carrying out the Be Your Hero campus with unaccompanied foreign minors showed us that the topic of soft skills - meaning observing ourselves and other people - remains a valid tool for personal growth of adolescents. In fact, during afternoon activities regarding reflections on their own and others’ abilities, participants found a space to tell their story and share their life experience as migrants, showing a strong need to be able to talk about themselves.
Project results
During the established three days, participants learned to be more conscious about their energies and their bodies in the urban space, as well as developed trust and respect towards the environment and other people.
In a world where you have to perform, where the main story is that “only those who arrive first will thrive”, and conditioned from their backgrounds to not trust anyone, it was disorienting for them to practice a sport where there were no points, no winners and no competitions in who managed to do more pushups. Art Du Déplacement led them to be curious about new movements, reactivating body and mind together, feeling the fear when faced with an exercise, taking their time to learn and understand how to deal with setbacks.
The training was complex in many aspects, including the linguistic one: some participants didn’t speak Italian, English nor French. This meant that who knew a shared language acted as a translator for the others, with the desire and interest to involve who would have been left out otherwise given these linguistic issues. Another challenge was opposing the tendency of the group to lose their focus, especially during afternoon activities, which involved mainly observing and communicating some aspects of their and others’ inner world:
As soon as the work rhythm showed the smallest sign of slowing down, they started to distract themselves with their phones and cigarettes: for us as well it was a thrilling job to find gentle and captivating ways to keep them focused on the process. Those three days, also thanks to the leverage of “superpowers” and of the tales of particular events that happened during the morning, we worked deeply on their loneliness, on tools to understand themselves better and share their inner world, on how to cultivate a situation together where trust and respect made them feel like they could express themselves.
I work with teenagers often, but during this experience I rediscovered how much care, presence and respect can favor the creation of a safe space. When the participants felt they could be accepted without judgement, they started trusting, looking for the other’s gaze and smiling with their heart. This made the experience not only educational, but profoundly human as well.
