Let me introduce myself. From a small town of the South of Italy to the Obama Foundation

Hi everyone, I am Roberto and I am new on Steemit. I just discovered this crazy community and I would be pleased to share my ideas, experiences and thoughts with all of you.

I grew up in this small town of the Amalfi Coast in the South of Italy, kind of paradise, fully crowded in the summer period and boring and empty in the winter time, even if always fascinating. Probably from Praiano you can enjoy the best sunset of the whole coast.

When I was 18 I moved to Bologna where I studied international relations. Then I had an exchange program in Lyon with the Erasmus program and I spent one year at Science Po. Once you live the Erasmus experience you can't go back with your life anymore. You feel to be a citizen of the world, the concept of nation quickly disappearsand you feel being part of a bigger community. It is during this period that I started to learn from other cultures.

So I decided to continue with my studies but I knew that I couldn't stop in the same place for too long anymore so I lived in Siena, Krakow, Brussels, Lyon again, Brussels again, then I returned in my home town and now I am in Madrid ready to start this new amazing experience. But before what's about the Obama Foundation?

Well in 2013 I was working in Brussels at the Belgian Italian Chamber of Commerce when the journalist Claudio Gatti contacted me and showed me an amazing project. I didn't know him but he heard about me and we met the first time on Skype.

His idea was to start an urban renewal project of Praiano, my hometown. Why? Because Praiano is in the center of the Amalfi coast but is "oppressed" by the fame of the well-known Positano, Amalfi and Ravello. We knew that Praiano deserved much more attention and so we decided to work on the Praiano Naturarte Project.

The NaturArte Project, inspired by Barcelona's Park Güell, is transforming Praiano in an extraordinary open air museum. Eight artists were asked to draw inspiration from local traditions to revitalize the tradition of street art typical of the old shrines.

We created the no-profit organization Agenda Praiano. The goal was to create a community organization that would promote social responsibility, cultural development and ecologically sustainable and “smart” economic growth for their town. And so we did.

On 15 June 2015, the Regional government of Campania, announced that the "NaturArte Project" was one of 31 proposals that won a tender for European “structural funds” allocated to finance new cultural tourism initiatives. We got 250k € and we implemented the first phase of the project installing about 150 artworks in ceramic divided in 8 itineraries.
But more important I have been experimenting a model for building social capital in a community with no such tradition.
This model, called Agenda Comune (Common Agenda) is not only scalable but can be applied in any context for dealing with all kinds of issues.

So one day I read about the Obama foundation Summit, they were inviting young civic leaders from all over the world to attend the Summit. It was possible to send the application and I tried. I couldn't expect to be selected but I was chosen among 15k applications. I felt so proud of what we're doing as never before.

During the Summit I had an amazing experience and I met incredible folks from all over the world. I was fascinated from all the stories I heard and probably from the first time I started to listen really as the President Obama asked us to do.

Now I am on this new community and I hope to know as much as I can and to share with all of you my ideas. What I am going to do now in Madrid? I will tell you in the next articles

Stay tuned and nice to meet you all

Cheers
Rob