Erasmus+ KA152-YOU · Youth exchange · Calabria, Italy
Reclaimed Code & Living Machines. Eight days in which 28 young people open the machines they were never allowed to open, and grow something out of the parts.
Almost every young person in Europe owns a machine they cannot open. This project puts it on a table.
Blaise Pascal built it from brass wheels so his father could stop adding tax columns by hand. The device in a young person's pocket in 2027 has a working life of roughly three years, is glued shut, and ends in a drawer because nobody in the household knows what else to do with it.
That drawer is the starting point of the project: the most ordinary object in European domestic life, and nobody has been asked to look inside it. Before travelling, every participant counts and photographs the unused and broken electronics in their own home and asks two adults one question: what did you do the last time something electrical broke? Four national tables go up on the wall on the first morning. Nobody but the participants produced them.
The numbers behind the drawer are large and well documented. This is not a story about a missing technology. It is a story about the distance between a rule and a household.
Documented collection & recycling of e-waste
62 million tonnes generated; less than a quarter formally collected and recycled.
The best region in the world, and still the one that loses most of it: 17.6 kg per person.
11.6 kg collected per inhabitant against a legal target of 65% — the brass line. Only a handful of Member States reached it.
The gap between the two is not a statistic. It is a set of decisions somebody made and somebody could change.
02 · Activity day 2 · The teardown
Mixed pairs at the outdoor tables, one donated device each, hand tools, gloves and eye protection. Everything that comes out is sorted into six labelled crates that become the parts library. Each pair completes a repair card: what the device was, what stopped it working, what stopped them opening it, whether a spare exists.
Environmental activities with young people usually end in agreement and nothing else, because they operate on opinions that were already there. This one operates on an object. A participant either gets the casing open or does not, and what they find inside is not a matter of view.
Each participant opens at least two devices with hand tools, names the main components, and records the glue, the proprietary screw, the riveted case or the missing spare on a repair card.
Count and photograph the drawer before travelling; compare four national totals on one wall; explain why that stock appears in no collection statistic.
Hand tools only, no purchased kit, no mains electricity. Wick-fed planters from printer casings, a moss panel in a monitor housing, seed trays from drive bays, a drip stand from a fan cage.
The free AI tools everyone is handed are treated the way the teardown treats a printer: what is this, what is it doing, where does it fail, what does it cost to run.
What the municipality collects, how far the nearest collection point is, whether a repair shop still exists — and which differences are local choices rather than facts.
The Machine Village Zine in five languages, and four participant-led sessions within three months of returning, reaching an estimated 50 to 80 people.
Every session runs the same shape: something is done first, in pairs or teams; then the room is asked what happened rather than what it means; then the thing gets a name; then it is applied to a different object.
Rooms, name games, safety briefing, first meal. No content. Wallet card with the venue address, 112 and five numbers, because a contact list that lives only on a phone is no use to someone whose phone is flat.
Participants write the working agreement and keep it on the wall all week. Erasmus+ and Youthpass introduced as a question, not a certificate. Four national household inventories on the wall. A short session sets a calculating machine built in 1642 against the object in the participant's pocket.
Output · working agreement · inventory wall
Mixed pairs at the outdoor tables. Everything sorted into six labelled crates: fasteners, casings, boards, optics, motors and magnets, cable. In the afternoon the repair cards go on the wall grouped by cause, and the pattern is the session. Evening: first intercultural evening.
Output · parts library · 28 repair cards
Each national group builds a panel from its preparation task: what the municipality collects, how far the nearest point is, what a repair costs, what people actually do. The four panels are read against each other, then against the European 65% target and the 2024 repair rules. Each group writes three things it would ask of a named local office.
Output · 4 route panels · 12 asks
Each participant writes instructions for a stranger to build one object from the parts library, swaps, and watches what goes wrong. Teams then test prompt templates on two shared laptops for three jobs: build photos into step-by-step instructions, a paragraph into four languages, sketching design options. The second block sorts published claims about what these tools cost into verified, unverified and could-not-check. Evening: mid-term review run by two participants.
Output · 56 template cards with failure notes
Mixed teams build the installations from the parts library: wick-fed planters from printer and scanner casings, a moss panel in a monitor housing, seed trays from drive bays, a drip stand from a fan cage. Hand tools only, nothing plugged into mains, nothing containing a battery. Each team keeps a build sheet. Evening: second intercultural evening.
Output · installations · build sheets
A clip-on macro lens from a disc drive, a magnetic tool strip from hard-drive magnets, a seed sieve from a fan housing, plant labels cut from casing plastic. The lens then photographs leaf detail for the zine. The afternoon is a half day outdoors on the paths around the venue, then free time.
Output · 4 hand tools · zine photographs
The morning assembles and plants the installations in the chosen outdoor corner, each with a care sheet and a label: what it was, who made it, how to repair it. The afternoon is the zine workshop: photo journals selected, build sheets turned into guides, route panels condensed into a spread. In national groups, participants rehearse their local build session.
Output · 6–10 planted objects · zine draft
Local sessions planned with named roles. Information on Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps. Final evaluation, written and in a facilitated round. Youthpass writing session — in the participant's own words, from a notebook that got dirty. Handover of the village with an agreed watering arrangement. Farewell evening.
Output · 4 session plans · 28 Youthpass
Each national group travels with its group leader, who holds the tickets and the timetable. Arrivals and departures grouped so nobody travels alone. Then: two booster tasks at three weeks and three months, and a delayed questionnaire.
Every activity day runs the same rhythm
A group from one place reaches the same conclusion within an hour: nothing can be done here. Put four places in one room, with the same object on the table and four different answers to where it goes, and the gap between 22.3% and 42.8% stops being a statistic. Seven participants per country, four of every seven places held for young people with fewer opportunities.
The Lighthouse Society · applicant & host
Recruited in Lamezia Terme and the towns around it, where travel out is expensive and indirect. The repair economy has not entirely disappeared here: two small electrical shops donate the devices the whole programme is built from.
Municipality of Catral · Valencian Community
A town of roughly 9,600 in the Vega Baja del Segura, where municipal staff know the families and a personal invitation carries further than any call. Three European projects behind it, including a 2025 youth exchange on environmental sustainability.
EcoYouth · informal group of young people
Villages of the southern Peloponnese where the bus goes twice a day and the nearest facility for anything is a drive away. A group that came together around animal welfare and environmental care, working through music, drawing and writing.
Zenith Bulgaria · informal group of young people
Recruited in Sofia and in smaller towns reached through the group's own networks. A group that has moved from sending young people to other people's projects to running its own, and assigns a committed leader from its own team to every project.
Distance bands indicative, to be confirmed with the Commission distance calculator. Both facilitators travel with the Italian group. 34 persons in total: 28 participants, 4 group leaders, 2 facilitators.
Domus Bethaniae, Località Colle Zingari, Platania — a residential centre in the Reventino hills of Calabria, at roughly 700 metres, used through the year by scout and youth groups. Sleeping rooms, meals and all working spaces on one site: a main room with a projector, a second room for parallel work, a covered outdoor area that becomes the workshop, open ground where the village is planted, and one quiet room never booked.
Calabria sits at the far end of the Programme's map. Travel out is expensive and indirect, and the common assumption is that European projects are for other people. It is also an honest place to host this particular project: a project about what we stopped being able to mend is better run where the memory of mending is still in living use.
Coordination is by checkable milestones rather than general oversight: each is something that either happened by a date or did not, recorded in a shared tracker all four organisations can see. Two of them decide whether the project works, and they are counted rather than confirmed.
Signed with each partner within six weeks of the grant decision, before recruitment starts. They open with the three objectives the consortium shares: every group arrives with its four held places filled, every participant leaves able to open a device, four local sessions happen.
At least four months before the activity, republished twice. The infopack goes out with the call, not after selection, so the shape of a working day, the packing list and "what does this cost me" are visible to someone deciding whether to apply at all.
Ten weeks before. The number of held places actually filled is reported as a number, not confirmed in general terms. A group that cannot fill its four keeps them open and keeps recruiting.
Travel booked, needs forms and insurance in, group leaders briefed. The screened device count is checked against a minimum of two openable devices per participant — the one logistical failure that would damage the programme rather than inconvenience it.
All 28 participants, four leaders and two facilitators meet once before travelling. Then the Drawer Census at home and the municipal question, collated per country two weeks before.
Eight activity days plus two travel days. 34 people, one site, six crates, a wall that stays up all week.
Sections finished by participants, designed and laid out by the host, four language versions delivered by the partners within two months. Booster at three weeks: photograph what you took to the collection point.
One per national group within three months, logged with date, place and attendance. The three-month questionnaire is the main measurement instrument, because the objectives are behavioural.
Is the zine being used outside the partnership? Which part of the format has each organisation put into its regular programme, and what did it drop? Recorded in the shared folder inside the project period.
How many sessions happened, what the questionnaire found, how many installations survived three months, and what did not work — published alongside the zine.
The first benefit is unusual and worth naming plainly: most participants will open a machine for the first time in their lives. The feeling of being locked out, which most young people carry about technology without having words for it, does not survive that. It is replaced by something more useful, which is irritation at the glue.
Step-by-step guides for four objects buildable from discarded electronics, each with materials, time, tools and what goes wrong. The four-country comparison of what actually happens to a broken device. The tested prompt templates with their failure notes. The workshop safety protocol, including what must never be opened, printed before the instructions rather than in an appendix. And an honest page on what the project could not verify.
Published on the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform and offered to the SALTO-YOUTH Toolbox, hosted by all four organisations so the file survives independently of any single website. Every guide specifies tools that cost under fifty euro in total, because the method has to be repeatable by an organisation with no budget.
For the four organisations, the same transferable set: four build sheets, the teardown session with its safety protocol, the route-mapping exercise and the prompt-template method. Each commits to running the format once in its regular work within a year — a first-time host that has now hosted, a municipality with a workshop its own staff can repeat for the cost of a tray of seedlings, two informal groups with a documented first project.
It claims the results above, measures them with a baseline, a delayed questionnaire and a count of what was made, and publishes what it finds — including the weak parts. Every participant leaves knowing the address of the nearest collection point to their own home, and having emptied, or made a dated plan to empty, the drawer they counted before travelling.
The partnership is deliberately uneven, and the unevenness is where the benefit sits. Combine organisations that reach young people who never see this kind of opportunity with organisations that can tell participants something specific and true about the subject, and keep every task small enough that a first-time host can support it.
Italy · applicant & host · OID E10439271
Lamezia Terme, Calabria. Founded in 2026 by two young people with working experience of the format as participants and facilitators. Holds the venue, the materials, the programme, the budget and the zine. Hosting for the first time — and the structure of the project is built around that.
Spain · partner · OID E10256343
Local public body, Valencian Community. The only partner that is itself part of the system the project examines. Reads the infopack, the recruitment timeline and the selection criteria before publication — the cheapest quality check available to a first-time host.
Greece · partner · OID E10352550
Informal group of young people, Skala, Laconia. Grassroots reach into the villages of the southern Peloponnese and a working practice that combines practical environmental work with music, drawing and writing — how you get a room of nervous people to start making something.
Bulgaria · partner · OID E10354173
Informal group of young people, Sofia. Photography and video practice that feeds the participant photo journals; experience of preparing participants who have never travelled for a project before; a dedicated group leader from its own team on every project.