Associação Inspira! - Intervenção juvenil e ambiental

‘Associação Inspira!’ is a youth non-governmental organization focused on environmental education and youth intervention. Evolving from an informal group, we are now over 50 associates, working for the social and ecological development of our region and the empowerment of its young people. We aim to socially improve education and opportunity on youngsters and young adults, by stimulating their sense of initiative and entrepreneurship. For that, we use non-formal education and intervention tools to promote actions on social inclusion, gender equality, employability, volunteer work, structured dialogue and intercultural education, mobilizing young people to make a change in our region paradigm.

Based on a small town in the northern hills of Portugal, we face a very isolated society, known for its closed mind, resistance to innovation and low contact with the exterior. With our environmental education programs and activities, both on schools and informal situations, alongside with the youth mobility and intercultural exchange projects, we aim to develop a more open background on our society, with a healthy and sustainable mentality and, that way, socially educate a region that is suffering from its isolation and the desertion of youth professionally qualified individuals that find it not stimulating and opened enough and with few opportunities for them.

Always with a ''young group that does stuff in the community'' spirit, we have been mobilizing ever more and more local young people as volunteers and associates, building volunteer groups and encouraging them into creating and leading their own intervention actions. This has been having a huge impact in our small-minded local society, that has never understand the concept of volunteering or civic participation and that has a lot of stigmas towards young people, seeing them as apathetic, irresponsible and incapable individuals, that local mentality being one of the main contributions for the ever growing desire to leave the town and region on our youth.