The Salt Youth Station is a free public service of the City Council of Salt for young people from 12 to 30 years old where information is given on everything young people need such as: studies, work, culture, sports, participation…
Creating experiences, moving illusions
The Salt Youth Station is a free public service of the City Council of Salt For young people from 12 to 30 years old, where information is given on everything young people need such as: studies, work, culture, sports, participation, etc. and where there are different services such as computers, publications and the Youth Health Point, among others. Within the Youth Station, Fundesplai manages one of the services: the Punt Jove de Salut.
In this last service, VIP is carried out, a project where life skills are promoted by working on health issues. The VIP Premium, the last stage of the VIP project, is based on the Learning and Service methodology. In this methodology it is the young people who think, define, establish a calendar and manage the entire project with the objective to offer a service in the Community after detection of the needs of its closest environment.
This year the group formed by 15 young people from Salt felt the curiosity to do a work with the residents of Els Til·lers, in the Martí i Julià Hospital Park (Santa Caterina) with chronic pathologies derived from mental health. The young people felt interest and were motivated to work together and thus be able to carry out activities and dynamics that offered the whole group a great richness in values, such as: respect, empathy, attention and improvement among others.
The young people were in charge of energizing these spaces of relationship. The project lasted 6 months and these relationships between these two areas have been valued very positively, often as stigmatized as young people and people affected by a problem derived from mental health. The people of El Til·lers are very grateful for the work of young people and they are delighted to have participated in a project that has given them another vision of what mental health is.
Here is the opinion of one of the young participants of the Vip Premium:
Can you tell us your name and what you do?
Rached Khrourouch. I studied a mid-cycle degree in commerce and now I work at the Decathlon.
Have you participated in previous VIPs, such as Vip 1 and Vip 2?
Yes. I have participated in all the previous Vip’s and the truth is that I have learned many aspects about health that I did not know. Apart from that, many of the young people we started have continued to this day participating in the Vip Premium project, that is, apart from learning knowledge we also learn to live together and to make cohesion between all.
What is the difference with premium vip? How would you define it?
In the Vip Premium you have more decision-making power and we choose among young people which is the community area where we want to carry out the project and, most importantly for us, how we want to develop it.
What did participating in this Service Learning project give you?
It has given me many things but I think that of the most important are: the degree of autonomy I have achieved, we have worked more on camaraderie in order to agree on many decisions and I have also broken many “taboos” about the field of mental health. The lack of knowledge of things makes us have many prejudices and in the Premium Vip I have been able to break them.
What does mental health mean to you?
It is the psychological well-being of a person. Everyone may one day suffer from a mental health illness.
Would you recommend the experience?
Yes. I would recommend it to many young people and not so young people so that they know how to value aspects of daily life that we often inadvertently miss.
Rached Khrourouch, 17 June 2015