On 22 September 2026, we held our first local workshop, and we couldn’t be prouder to have shared it with ONCE members and volunteers in their center in Santander, Cantabria. For those who may not know it yet, ONCE is one of Spain’s leading organisations, and one of the largest in the world, working with and for people with disabilities, in this case people with visual disabilities. For Ser Joven, inclusion is not an addition to the project: it is our starting point. During this first workshop, we discovered that poetry does not have to be a solitary or individual activity, and that it can also be created collectively. In fact, when we create poetry together, the group feeds and inspires itself: we draw inspiration from one another, share ideas, dare to experiment, and make space for the unexpected to emerge. We used language games to spark creativity and break the ice, and discovered that humour can also be an essential ingredient of good poetry. We explored the haiku, learned about the history of this poetic form that has fascinated poets for centuries and across different parts of the world, and discovered its connections with one of our local poetic forms: the seguidilla. One of the participants even delighted us by singing one. As you can see, we created together, played, improvised, and wrote poetry in the moment. During the workshop, we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, brave, and creative at the same time. There was also space for reflection. One of the participants asked what themes or concepts had emerged in the poems written by participants from different countries during the project's activity in Italy, where we wrote about ourselves. As we shared our experiences, we realised that many people expressed their personal identity in connection with the place they came from, or through their love for their families, their children, grandchildren, parents and grandparents; through nostalgia, memories, contradictions, and through the things that might have been. And we arrived at a reflection that beautifully captures what we experienced during the workshop. As one of the participants said: wherever we are in the world, we can find love and a sense of belonging. Perhaps that is precisely what this project, and poetry itself, reminds us of: that although our stories, languages, places of origin, age may be different, there are emotions and shared human experiences that connect us. That we, as people, are much more alike than we think. And that there is poetry everywhere.

https://poetryforparticipation.wordpress.com/results-resources/