I’m Michela, an Italian IVY volunteer operating in Slovenia at PiNA. I had already spent a year at the same organization during my ESC experience, a project that allowed me to get a broader view of the organization’s projects and the city. Through that I met another IVY volunteer who was working on a question that stuck with me: who actually looks after the Karst forests along the border? And if a fire breaks out, which country do you even call? Watching partners and professionals with different backgrounds and nationalities come together to give that need a voice, opened up a whole world I’d never thought about before.

That’s how the second opportunity came along: my colleagues, noticing my interest in environmental topics, education for young people and communication, suggested I join RE-ACTIVE, an Italy-Slovenia cross-border cooperation project. Compared to my ESC experience, the focus here shifted: I mostly work on reading, understanding project content, alongside creating custom made visual communication for the open calls and social media.

One thing I didn’t expect was how useful my native language would turn out to be. Knowing the nuances of Italian allowed me to help the team find new ways to communicate to the public, choosing words that made calls and selection results feel warmer and less bureaucratic. Together we turned online communications that started off quite institutional into messages that felt more welcoming, built for people who didn’t know the project yet. A concrete example: when the Participatory Academy call didn’t reach the number of participants we’d hoped for, I started a small analysis process with my colleagues to rethink the communication. The idea was simple: we didn’t send just a long text to someone who didn’t know anything about the project yet, instead we paired it with clear, well-designed infographics that summarized the strong points. Above all, we focused on what the project could actually offer in terms of personal and professional growth to them.

Helping the team every day, and feeling like my ideas genuinely carry weight in the workflow, has probably been the most rewarding part of this. I’ve also had the chance to get to know other projects, other minds, other ways of working. I also had the opportunity to join another interesting initiative led by PiNA during my holidays, the Ideathon.

There I learnt a method for encouraging youth participation in the social community and I couldn’t wait to try it out to build an idea of my own, the Sus Lab, a project I’d like to launch before my time here is up. It’s still about sustainability, but through short workshops that bring together art and care for the environment, showing how some sustainable practices (like making recycled paper) are more accessible than they seem, and can be reproduced on a small scale by anyone at home, or in a dedicated lab. Volunteering on a project like this gives me a really interesting vantage point: close enough to see how the pieces fit together, but still new enough to notice how much room there is to grow, especially when it comes to visual communication that actually builds participation. I still have a lot to give, and I can’t wait to keep contributing to PiNA and to RE-ACTIVE.