A small group of young people stood on a street corner in Peniche with a phone camera and a list of questions, waiting for a stranger to say yes. They had landed in the Portuguese surf town two days earlier knowing almost nothing about it. By the time they pressed record, they were already treating the place as something to understand before trying to change it.
That instinct, to look before acting, ran through the whole of Shock Waves, the youth exchange we joined in Peniche alongside partners from five countries. Young people from Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Portugal came together to work out, in practice, what makes a community more inclusive and whether they could prove it by building something real.
Reading a town before changing it
The week did not open with plans. It opened with attention. In a guided beach meditation the group called Echoing Reflections of Home, participants sat with the places they came from: who shaped them, what their own communities lack, where the gaps in opportunity sit. Only after turning that lens on themselves did they turn it on Peniche.
As Community Detectives, they watched short documentaries about the town’s quieter lives, the van-life community, the small businesses, the people who keep a coastal place running off-season. Then they went looking for the rest themselves, splitting into small international groups and interviewing residents on camera. The films they brought back were rough and honest, and they became the raw material for everything that followed.
One of the short films the groups made from their interviews with Peniche locals.
From six ideas to three events
Understanding a place is one thing. Acting on it without flailing is another, and this is where the method earned its keep. Across the Kaleidoscope of Possibilities sessions, six international teams generated event ideas under themes ranging from environment to art to digital, then pitched them to the room, which voted on two simple questions: would you come, and could everyone come?
From there the ideas were stress-tested rather than romanticised. Teams ran a SWOT analysis on each proposal, hunted down and sequenced the real tasks behind an event in a Task List Hunt, and assigned the unglamorous work in a session they called Building the Blueprint: who books the venue, who sources materials, who keeps it accessible. Six ideas narrowed to three the group could actually deliver.
The events the town was invited to
By the final days, Peniche itself became the venue. One group ran a beach clean-up, choosing stretches of coast and working through them together. Another hosted a yoga and meditation session on the sand, led by participants and open to locals who wandered over. The last threw a karaoke night, complete with a voting system the young people designed, where residents sang alongside the group.
None of the three needed an expert to happen. That was the point the week kept making: you do not have to be a specialist to organise something inclusive and worthwhile for the people around you. You have to look, plan, and show up.
Five evenings, five countries
Between the working sessions, each national group took an evening to host the others. Across five cultural nights, Hungary, Czechia, Portugal, Slovakia, and Romania each put their traditions, food, music, and games on the table for everyone else. The evenings did the quiet work the agenda could not: they turned five separate groups into one that trusted each other enough to argue, plan, and build together.
What the network carries from Peniche
Shock Waves was part of CJE’s Accreditation. What stays with us is less the three events than the sequence that produced them: reflect, investigate, design, test, deliver. It is a way of working young people can carry into any town they care about, and it is exactly the kind of method our network exists to spread.
The participants left Peniche with friendships across five countries and something harder to photograph: the proof, in their own hands, that reading a community carefully is the first half of changing it.
Photo Gallery
A few more moments from this activity :)
Check these and more photos in the activity’s photo album.
