Cascia, Umbria
16–19 July 2026
A twenty-five-metre flag takes a lot of hands to carry. Ours was the Italian PACE flag – rainbow stripes with the word for peace across them – and when I sent photos home, several friends asked what I was doing at a parade. It is an easy confusion to make. Umbria has been carrying this flag since 1961, and what it stands for there is something closer to camaraderie: a commitment to live constructively alongside one another, in peace and against conflict, especially armed. Watching young people deliver an appeal to peace through poetry, beyond any ideology, it was hard not to feel that the confusion itself is worth talking about – which is, after all, what history education is for.
That walk was one afternoon of the Social Hackathon Umbria (#SHU2026), now in its tenth edition and held this year together with a Peace Village. Organised by EGInA with CRHACK LAB Foligno 4D and Screeen 2 Soul, under the patronage of the European Parliament and with the support of Erasmus+, it brought more than 400 participants and 46 nationalities to a mountain pilgrimage village of Cascia of a few thousand people. Eight mentored teams – and roughly twice as many junior ones – spent 48 hours co-creating solutions around three dimensions of peace: with oneself, with the Earth, and among peoples. EuroClio was among the partner organisations.
Our contribution was a three-hour workshop built around SENSEI’s Puzzles of Empathy, the educational game developed within the Erasmus+ Teacher Academy SENSEI: School EducatioN for Sustainable and Equitable Inclusion. The premise is simple and slightly uncomfortable by design: inclusion is not a warm feeling, but a set of decisions that eventually build a mindset. The game makes participants take such decisions through facilitated roleplay.
For anyone working with young people, Umbria’s Social Hackathons – and the C.R.E.A. Cultura festivals alongside them – are a demanding model to replicate; you need a highly driven team behind it. But they are worth borrowing from. Prosperity built through difference rather than despite it is easy to write into a project proposal and difficult to carry out. In Cascia, for four days, it was carried out and we all lived what the event’s topic preached.
More about the event: socialhackathonumbria.info More about the project: SENSEI – School EducatioN for Sustainable and Equitable Inclusion
