CITYFUL is a project that specifically targets Europe’s NEET youth, an English acronym for Neither in Employment or in Education or Training, meaning those people not engaged in work, study or training. This is a category that has seen a worrying increase in the pandemic years, adding to the number of young people who have dropped out of school, and therefore needs to be brought to the center of a social discussion and a series of dedicated actions and stimuli to facilitate reintegration into school and training or approach the world of work for the first time.
CITYFUL intends to offer an answer to these needs through play, an effective reactivation tool for those who have lost confidence in learning in formal places, and the Third Sector, showing its resources and professional opportunities to all those young people who mistakenly consider it a less fulfilling horizon than the world of "for-profit" work.

The project has received funding of over 200,000 euros from the Erasmus+ - Capacity Building in the Field of Youth program (Key Action 2); the Municipality of Cinisello Balsamo is involved as lead partner, in collaboration with and social enterprise Itinerari Paralleli (Italy), the association Nordic European Mobility (Sweden), the Co-Actions network (France) and the incubator Trokut Sibenik (Croatia).

The specific objectives of CITYFUL are:

1) To promote the role of youth workers as mediators between the needs of young people and the opportunities offered by the local Third Sector for civic engagement and employability;
2) Provide youth workers with new digital tools and useful resources for engaging NEETs and youth who have dropped out of school;
3) Create new opportunities for youth (especially NEETs and school dropouts) for civic activation and skill development, so that they become "young city-change-makers."
4) Promoting the role of the Third Sector among young people, particularly as a space for personal and professional growth.

The main activities consist of:

• Coordination meetings among partners, hosted in Cinisello Balsamo;
• The creation of an interactive digital game, "Cityful": in an imaginary but plausible-looking city, participants will be called upon to face certain challenges, networking and optimizing the present resources represented by Third Sector organizations and professionals. The rules and setting of the game will be defined through co-design sessions (both online and in-person, hosted in turn by each partner country), under the guidance of Itinerari Paralleli.
The game can be used in the future by any youth worker, for example in NEET and drop-out re-activation pathways.
• The design of an Online Training Course aimed at transferring theoretical and experiential skills to a selected pool of European youth workers. The training will be dedicated to an in-depth study of the dynamics of the Third Sector’s functioning and the new approaches of social entrepreneurship, through the lens of the "social innovator," which crosses the ability to read and interpret the territories and its communities, with the management skills that the social enterprise needs to become that new sustainable, professionalizing entity capable of guaranteeing new opportunities for young people.
• A learning workshop open to youth and youth workers and that will be hosted in Italy. Participants will be involved in the refinement phase of the "Cityful" game, through the experimentation of the same and the collection of feedback; the knowledge of the Third Sector (both at the local and European level) will be promoted as a resource capable of receiving the requests of young people and transforming them into actions directed to the development of the community and as a useful resource to respond to the training and professional needs of the new generations; it will strengthen the role of the youth worker as an essential liaison figure between the needs of NEET and dropout youth and the world of the Third Sector; it will offer the young people involved an opportunity for active participation and the development of soft and professional skills.
• Peer-to-peer educational workshops: once back at their home countries, Learning Activity participants will be asked to promote Cityful play at their cities, within schools and youth services.
• Project promotion events in all participating countries.