“Going borderless” while shaping a better tomorrow in the crossborder territory between Italy and Slovenia
Dear all readers; I’m Carlotta, a 24-years-old master degree student and IVY Volunteer at the Interreg Programme Italia-Slovenia Joint Secretariat offices in Trieste/Trst. It’s already been three months since the beginning of my experience, thus I feel like I can present to you what such volunteering experience entails. I’ve been assigned to the communication and joint secretariat office, where a team of young people and regional policy officers welcomed me warmly. Almost all the members of the staff are bilingual (italo-slovenian) and for me it’s such an interesting reality to discover day by day. Not being a local (I was born and raised in Venice), I already got the chance to live in this cross-border territory when I was studying for my bachelor degree in Gorizia/Nova Gorica so I was acquainted with the culture and the language even tho Slovenian is no joke to learn from an Italian native speaker. I’ve already reached the first half of my programmed period of volunteering and these months passed by so quickly. Nonetheless I got already so many opportunities to expand my network during all the international meetings that I’ve attended and to enhance my expertise in communication duties. I started my experience strong attending on the first three days of work the Monitoring Committee activites in Venice: my very first occasion to meet my working team and to help them with the event orgranizaion duties. The week after, I got invited to Brussels for the European Week of Regions and Cities, where I also met the AEBR Team. During those days my Program hosted the first ever multi-Program event to enhance a further collaboration among three countries (Italy, Slovenija and Croatia) and between two Programmes: Interreg Italia-Slovenija and Interreg Italy-Croatia. The meetings and the activities have been so succesful that proposals of enhanced cooperation projects have been made on that very day. My volunteering experience was also higlighted by the presence of two EU Commission’s rapporteurs that came for 3 days from Brussels to the Program Area in order to visit the places and the venues where the most important meetings and activities of Gorizia-Nova Gorica Capital of Culture 2025 will take place. I travelled across the cross-border area between Italy and Slovenia, realizing even further all the characteristics of the territory and getting to know some of my future main activities to organize such as the InterregGO Annual Event for youth of March 2025 (don’t forget to come, guys!). I can not miss to mention that beside the very dynamic activities that I’ve described, a lot of time in the months of December and January was also dedicated to fully understand how to write and post an article on our online platforms and to create by scratch new leaflets and booklets describing in detail the projects participating in the Programme. This very experience, even if it’s not my first time being part of an international office thematized on European funds’ administration policies, is making me acquire so many technical and relational skills that for sure will be important and helpful in my near future. I am already recommending to sign up as volunteers to all of my closer friends looking for a valuable opportunity, given my very positive opinion about my work. Last but not least, being an IVY, beside providing you with valuable experiences enriching your CV, has a strong positive impact on your local reality helping promoting cooperation while actively participating in shaping a common future useful for us, young people, to be the lead characters of EU’s cooperation policies. – Carlotta, IVY Reporter for the Interreg Programme Italia-Slovenia at the Joint Secretariat Discover more about Interreg Italy-Slovenia Click Here
