Hannah helped start the first class in Rome
I’m an organiser volunteer in Rome – since 2018 when we started planning Rome. I learned a lot about the tech world, and from fellow mentors and volunteers about how young dynamic companies work and change much quicker than the hierarchical old media world I’ve worked in. I’ve gotten to practice public speaking, and do presentations in Italian, learned how to use Slack and Trello and most of all met some amazing people – students and volunteers. I’ve started a part-time gig as a university teacher myself in the meantime and am bringing some of the skills I saw in our CYF classroom to the job.
It’s easy to promote CYF – people from the development or business worlds tend to get it immediately and are impressed because it’s such a concrete project with relatively fast tangible results.
I felt most proud when one of our mentors, who had had a lot of doubts, said eventually: they are thinking like coders now. I think they can find jobs. Another good moment came on graduation day when one of the clients for the final projects said it was so good he would present the project to the Ministry of Work and it would likely be adopted for managing the entire community service programme.