Funded by the Culture of Solidarity Fund of the European Cultural Foundation and by the European Union through the European Solidarity Corps, Waves of Change: Young Journalists for Europe was created to bring media literacy where spaces and opportunities to truly understand it are often lacking: among young people who encounter news, images, and messages every day, but rarely have the tools to read them critically.

In the classrooms of the Casanova Institute in Naples and the Vico High School in Laterza, we built small laboratories of civic imagination together with students. We discussed how to recognize a reliable source, what it means to tell the story of a territory without stereotypes, and how to listen to a community before translating it into a narrative. We experimented with photographs that challenge common clichés, headlines that overturn toxic narratives, and emotional maps of neighborhoods and towns seen from their perspective.

Each meeting was an exercise in attention: not only toward journalistic techniques, but toward what happens when a group of young people realizes they have a voice and, above all, the right to use it.

It is from this journey that the Young European Journalist Summer Week takes shape, because media literacy is not just a subject to study: it is an expanding experience, a way of being in the world.

Young European Journalist Summer Week

From July 7 to 12, 2025, at the Terre Joniche cooperative in Capo Rizzuto (Calabria), on property confiscated from organized crime, young people aged 15 to 19 took part in a residential training program dedicated to writing, reportage, photography, and podcasting, guided by professionals from the field.

Like waves, we believe in the power of change. The Young European Journalist Summer Week is part of the WAVES project, which aims to train the storytellers of tomorrow – often excluded from traditional information circuits – by offering them critical and creative tools to read and narrate reality.

Every story is a commitment to communities

Through Sara Manisera’s teachings on journalism that gives voice back to communities, and Francesco Pileggi’s theatrical exercises on the revolutionary power of storytelling, we learned to feel before telling.

Faced with Giuseppe Pipita’s harrowing photographs of the Cutro shipwreck, and with the quiet words of the young people from SABIR, Calabria revealed its truest face. Every story is a commitment to be honored.

Here you can find reportages, podcasts, photographs, and stories created by participants, the result of a week of workshops, meetings, and discoveries at the intersection of journalism and collective storytelling.

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