Step 2
Turn your wish to know into your right to know
Understand
If shared by others, the individual’s wish to know can be pursued as a collective need or as an aspirational goal. It means leaving a more emotional and instinctive perspective to evolve towards a more rational and reflective phase, oriented to understanding how and what to do, using a problem-solving approach. To solve a problem, you first have to know about it: the key to a strategy for change is knowledge and the awareness of the different aspects of the identified issue, such as both the broader and the local contexts, the relevant stakeholders, and the economic resources available. Making youth understand that there is a right for them to access this knowledge is crucial.
The ‘right to know’ is in all respects a human right, and as such has to be guaranteed for everyone. Moreover, it is also a practical tool that makes it possible to obtain the desired information about the public and common goods that are the object of the youth group’s desires and passions.
Exercising their right to know allows young people to start to think positively about their potential impact on making change.
Experience
Learning about one’s right to know is an empowering process for young people, who realise that they are the repositories of a power which allows them to access information of public interest about their needs and desires.
When presenting the topic to the group, it is therefore more effective to talk about the meaning behind this right, and not about the laws and norms that institute it in our jurisdictions.
After addressing its meaning, understanding how to put it into practice as a tool for transparency allows for the planning and implementation of a problem-solving strategy capable of offering a response to the identified needs and aspirations. The proposed activity of the so-called ‘Monitoring Walk’ allows us to do just that: to explore the context, to identify urban ‘full and empty’ spaces that correspond to the participants’ needs and aspirations, and to find information (or missing information) useful for strategy of action for positive change.
