We had a WhatsApp group from MYA. People from the program stayed in it after Barcelona, mostly sharing random opportunities that came across our feeds.
That’s where Giulia posted it. She was one of the MYA coordinators. The European Youth Energy Forum, EYEF, fourth edition, happening in Catania in October. 862 people applied. A hundred got in.
I applied in May.
This one worked differently than MYA. In Barcelona we showed up already knowing the policy positions we wanted to argue for. Here, the policy itself hadn’t been written yet. That was the job. Ten weekly online sessions from June through September, building a proposal from nothing, before the in-person part even started.
My team focused on the skills gap in the energy sector. Not enough people trained for the jobs this transition actually needs. We built our proposal around three things: fast reskilling programs for people already in the workforce, closer ties between universities and industry so graduates come out job-ready instead of theory-ready, and vocational education that reaches people outside the usual cities, not just the ones already near a training center.
Writing policy with a team you’ve only ever met on video calls is its own kind of work. Everyone has a slightly different idea of what “practical” means. We spent more sessions than I expected just arguing over language, whether a recommendation was specific enough to be useful or vague enough to survive contact with people who’d actually have to implement it.
By September the proposal had a shape. In October we flew to Catania, which had just been named Italy’s Youth City for the year, and spent five days finishing what we’d started online.
We visited the 3SUN Gigafactory, which is not a small thing to see in person if you’ve only ever read about battery manufacturing in a report. We went to the Enel Foundation’s Innovation Hub. We sat across from people from IRENA, from UNIDO, from the European Commission, and had to defend a proposal we’d been building for months in front of people who actually work on this for a living.
I won’t pretend that wasn’t intimidating. It was. But it was a different kind of intimidating than Barcelona had been. In Barcelona I was still getting used to being in rooms like that at all. In Catania, I already knew I could hold a position under pressure. What I didn’t know yet was whether the position itself was any good, and that’s a harder thing to find out.
We presented the proposal to the expert panel on one of the last days. I don’t remember every question they asked, but I remember not freezing on any of them, which felt like its own kind of progress from two years earlier.
What I keep thinking about since Catania is how much of this year came from people, not plans. Giulia posting a link in a group chat. John doing the same thing a year before that with MYA. None of these opportunities showed up because I went looking for them in some structured way. They showed up because I stayed in touch with people, and because when something landed in front of me, I did something with it instead of scrolling past.
I still don’t have a finished answer for what I’m building toward long term. But I’ve stopped expecting one clean answer to show up. What I have instead is a pattern I trust: something arrives, and I say yes before I feel fully ready. So far, that’s worked out better than waiting to feel ready ever did.