Prevention and Awareness
In a world where urban and media noise tries to confuse and numb the deepest human feelings, every day the city becomes an opencast theater where a commedia dell’arte is continuously staged and where everyone pretends to be what they aren’t in a desperate attempt to find themselves.
And in this socio-introspective bazaar you may find skillful seducers and souls dealers who promise easy ways to detect and redeem, as well as artificial paradises where the thirst for truth naturally part of every human heart is diluted into false hopes reflected by a 30-second-TV ad.
And New Horizons' sector for Prevention and Awareness works exactly in this dramatic context of humanitarian emergency "round the corner", starting right from all non-typical places of contemporary "so-called modern culture" - stations, subways, shopping malls, but particularly the street - and in all most traditional public spaces such as squares, once it lost its habitual anthropological function of gathering and meeting, it then became a place for merely private interests and "disposable people". At night, the privileged moment of gathering between the loneliness of the mass society and a desire for a more or less authentic underground rebellion, thousands of young people let out a silent cry for help that the Community intends to collect and guard, releasing and redeeming that hollow voice.
Thus streets and squares were transformed from places just to be rapidly passed by with distrust and disinterest, to real open-cast laboratories for confrontation and discussion; this way the turnstiles and the toilets in the subway became impromptu meeting and listening centers, transforming and subverting traditional and ordinary perceptions about supportive relationship. Thus, it is a new way of acting characterized by a real centrifugal movement, which inspires all those involved in this mobilization, to go towards, to come out of oneself, to reach out to the other, by making the individual and every relationship the focus of any of our work and mission.
Prevention and awareness initiatives (annual averages)
- 1,000,000 people contacted at conventions, meetings, round tables, exhibitions, conferences, schools, beaches, clubs and other gathering places
- 4-5 street missions
- approximately 35,000 people contacted in each mission
- over 250 schools (meetings and discussions during classes and school assemblies).
Planning and methodologies for intervention
Relying on several years of specific experience, New Horizons has been able to develop an intervention method particularly suitable for those areas of life extremely difficult, such as marginalization, social hardship and addiction; this was possible thanks to the contribution of the same children who had been formerly welcomed in the community, coming from the same world of the new ones, having walked a long journey of rebirth and learnt a new approach to life, now introducing themselves as the most compelling speakers.
We are currently planning outreach and nationwide projects:
- Ordinary work on the street, specifically at "hot" places as SER.T (public drug treatment units), stations, subways, squares, public gardens, clubs, discos, pubs;
- Specific activities for prevention, information, cultural activities, recreation and entertainment (especially on beaches in the summer) and single specific activities (missions) on a particular part of the territory for a period of several days;
- Projects for prevention and awareness to youth problems and delinquency specific for schools;
- Active testimonies at meetings, debates and round tables;
- Training workshops on prevention and intervention methods;
- Consultation centers and reception or orientation talks.
Together with the Animation and entertainment sector we propose other types of activities: street animations, musicals and shows; while in collaboration with the Communication and Media sector we organize prevention and awareness activities through TV, radio and especially the Internet (blogs, instant messaging and social networks).
