Over the past two years, Strait Up was part of something pretty unforgettable: Youth Impact through Community Festivals (YICF), an Erasmus+ KA210-YOU project that proved that when young people take the lead, a festival can be way more than music and food — it can inform, create opportunities, and actually change a community.
The whole idea behind YICF was to help youth workers and young people (especially those who usually don’t get many chances) learn how to create inclusive and sustainable festivals with purpose. Through the process our participatns learned everything from public speaking and budgeting to teamwork, co-creation, and social innovation. All this was done in an intercultural setting with colleagues from all over Europe.
The project brought together teams from Italy, Norway, Romania, and Spain, including Strait Up from Tarifa. Looking back, YICF had a whole journey of activities: it kicked off in Romania, moved to Norway for trainer training, rolled into six months of capacity building online, then hands-on festival co-design with youth, plus an awesome youth exchange in Italy. And of course, the grand finale: four local festivals, one in each partner country — all planned and run by us.
The final crown is creation of a multilingual toolkit explaining how to design inclusive, civic-impact festivals. It’s set to be launched across EU platforms in 2026, so the ideas we tested will keep spreading long after the project’s end.
In Tarifa, Global Society Institute (GSI) played a major role. The White House became our festival home base, and it also hosted the Project Management Evaluation group. And something big happened along the way: thanks to working with YICF youth, the GSI Youth Advisory Board was born — a lasting legacy of young people shaping the future of their own communities.
