During the years, Rondine developed different projects for Italian schools and international youth, aimed at fostering dialogue, conflict transformation, and exchange through education. Here are some of the most relevant projects (ongoing and completed).
The project that gave rise and inspiration to Rondine is the Studentato Internazionale – World House. It hosts young people coming from countries that are the scene of armed conflicts or post-conflict and helps them to discover the human being in their enemy, through the difficult and surprising effort that comes from living together daily. The program is structured in 4 areas: academic education, conflict transformation training, civic engagement, daily life. At the end of the two years, the youth of the World House has the tools to promote action and develop projects in their own countries and to be leaders in contexts characterized by transformation, high complexity, and rooted conflicts.
The Quarto Anno Rondine is a formative and educational opportunity officially recognized by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities, and Research as an experimental course in educational innovation. It is designed for students from all over Italy from high schools who want to attend their fourth year (Italian high school is divided into five years) in an international environment such as the Citadel of Peace. The Rondine Method is applied to the education of teenagers who are about to face one of the most important conflicts of their lives: searching for their identity, in the passage from childhood to adulthood. They undertake a path of development and self-awareness, to become leaders and agents of real change in their territories, as active citizens. Rondine is currently experimenting with the adaptation of the “Quarto Anno” project in Italian public schools, training teachers and tutors to locally apply the Rondine Method, and support students. The pilot project is being implemented in Arezzo, planning further development in other Italian areas in 2022.
“Mediterranean: Frontier of Peace, Education, and Reconciliation” is a 2-year higher education program offered to young professionals from different Mediterranean countries, characterized by tensions or situations of conflict, who will access a course of higher education. The study program includes three modules: design of social, cultural, and research projects; conflict transformation and the Rondine Method; leadership and strategy skills. After the first year in Rondine, professionals return to their countries of origin with adequate skills to manage socio-cultural changes, initiate cooperation interventions, plan peacebuilding and social enterprise initiatives. They implement their projects, in partnership with local civil society organizations. The project was selected to be showcased at the Paris Peace Forum (November 2021) as an innovative solution to face global challenges, especially in terms of fighting the socio-cultural consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Upon the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked Rondine Cittadella della Pace to represent Italy at the United Nations with its experience of “a tangible example offering a fresh start on the vast topic of human rights, which today represent an urgent challenge for the entire planet”. Rondine rose to this challenge by launching a three-year global campaign, Leaders for Peace. The core element of this campaign is an Appeal, a text written by Rondine’s students and alumni, in which the Member States of the United Nations are asked to take a practical step towards training young leaders for peace, equipped with the skills to positively transform conflict situations around the world. The global Leaders for Peace campaign is Rondine Cittadella della Pace’s unique commitment to contribute directly, within a few years, to affirm a new culture of human rights, by training leaders for peace and enabling citizens all over the world to transform conflicts positively, by integrating training in the Rondine Method with education on human rights.
The project “Una nuova classe dirigente per la Sponda Sud del Mediterraneo” (A new leadership for the Southern shore of the Mediterranean) is an international cooperation process undertaken by Rondine in 2012 after the events of the so-called Arab Spring. It aimed to help the new generations from the South Mediterranean to understand the current transformation processes and actively participate in the phase of historical changes their countries were going through. The project is structured in local educational programs, implemented in 2012, 2013, and 2014 at the Citadel of Peace and the Centro per la Formazione alla Solidarietà Internazionale di Trento (Centre for the Education to International Solidarity of Trento). Through the application of the Rondine Method, fifty young people from the Middle East and North Africa have been trained to become agents of change. The project finished in April 2016 in Trento with the International Symposium “Sponda Sud. Nuove prospettive per il Mediterraneo” (South Shore. New perspectives for the Mediterranean).
