I met John at COY17. We just ended up talking between sessions and stayed in touch after. Mostly short messages here and there, “how’s everything going,” that kind of thing. Almost a year later, he sent me a link. A program in Barcelona. He said it sounded like something I should apply to.
I didn’t apply right away. First I checked the eligibility criteria. Then I checked it again, because I wasn’t fully convinced I qualified even though I clearly did. That’s just how my brain works sometimes.
The program was the Mediterranean Youth Academy, third edition. Run by the Union for the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean Youth Foundation for Development, with support from the German development agency GIZ. Three thematic clusters: climate change and climate justice, social inclusion, and youth employment.
I applied. Two weeks later they called me for an interview.
I didn’t have a perfect pitch ready. I just told them the truth. I talked about the clubs at school, DigiGirlz, the Smart Bin project that didn’t make it to nationals. I talked about COY17 and what it changed in me. I told them I wanted a future where young people actually get a platform to speak, not just a seat somewhere near the back of the room.
I don’t know what exactly landed. But they said yes.The Academy ran for four days that November. Around a hundred young people, from about twenty countries across the Euro-Mediterranean region. It was built as non-formal education, which basically means fewer lectures, more workshops designed to actually pull a position out of you instead of just handing you information. We spent those four days drafting real policy recommendations, the kind that fed into a guidebook the Foundation puts together after every edition. The whole thing led into the High-Level Launch Event of the UfM Youth Action Plan, where some of what we worked on actually reached people who sit in rooms with ministers.
My group focused on youth engagement in the region’s energy transition and cross-border cooperation on renewables. Policy language, basically. Not something I’d done much of before. Honestly, the first two days I said less than I wanted to. I was in a room with people who’d been doing formal youth advocacy for years, who talked about policy frameworks like it was their first language. By day three I started talking more. Mostly because I noticed nobody in that room had it all figured out either.
What stuck with me after wasn’t one panel or one recommendation we drafted. It was smaller than that. It was just the fact that the room took my ideas seriously enough to write them down next to everyone else’s.
I’d spent two years feeling like I had to earn my seat everywhere I went. First at ENSET, then in every club and competition after that. In Barcelona, for once, I didn’t feel like I was auditioning. I felt like I’d already been picked, and now I just had to do the work.
I think about how none of this happens without someone else seeing something in me before I saw it in myself. People like to talk about initiative like it’s this purely internal thing you generate on your own. Mine wasn’t. Mine started with a link from someone I’d met once, and a decision that was still mine to make: opening it.
I came back from Barcelona still without a clear answer to the question I’d been sitting with since my second year of engineering. What was I actually building toward? But I had a longer list of rooms I knew I could hold my own in now. And a growing feeling that the technical work I was training for and the advocacy I kept getting pulled toward on the side didn’t have to be two separate things.
Maybe they never did.