Lorena Silvestri

I work in youth promotion and mentoring, with a special focus on social entrepreneurship and innovation and communication skills. I love facilitating workshops, big and small, training trainers and designing programs. Also organizing events! I'm part of the TEDxYouth@Madrid team in Madrid were I specially enjoy spotting great young speakers and helping them prepare. I work as a freelance and in my own organization Punto JES, a non profit to support young people with their ideas and projects of social change. Also as consultant for other organizations like Ashoka, Telefonica Foundation-Think Big, Impact Hub Madrid, IE Business School or Google in Spain. In 2014 I volunteered at Tinkering School, flew into San Francisco to work and learn with Gever Tulley and his team. Since then, I've ran several Tinkering sessions with a great team in Madrid and we are working on starting Tinkering School Madrid. I'm lucky to work with and for United World Colleges, a movement of over 50 K graduates and 15 international schools that uses education as a tool for peace and a sustainable future. First as a volunteer for more than 10 years in Spain and later as a consultant for UWC in Maastricht, The Netherlands and Santa Ana, Costa Rica. This is also where I went to school, 2001-2003 in Duino, Italy. After that, I did my BA training in Integrated Social Sciences at Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) and MBA in Cultural Enterprises and Institutions at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Santillana. I Trained in Gymboree method for early stimulation and learning for children 0 to 5 and families. If you are wondering it was Clowning that turned my life around, when I co-founded with my friend Carmen the theatre-clown company Bailando Esperan(za) and started an international cooperation project 2010-2014... we visited India, Venezuela, Israel and Palestina and acted for over 3000 people in rural areas. This gave me a new understanding of service, I discovered social entrepreneurship and decided to dedicate my profesional life to changing the world.

Starting things, empowering youth, transformative education, food and cooking, traveling, meeting new people, being on stage, tinkering around...

I first ran into TED so many years ago I don't even remember, but I do remember watching Sir Ken Robinson in his acclaimed Does School kills creativity? And then, TED had me for ever. In 2011 I was asked to help Massar prepare for his TedxYouth@Madrid talk, he was late for rehearsal and I started calling him on the phone, and right next to me someone else was on the phone, calling Massar. It was Antonella Broglia, license holder for the event and ambassador in Europe. Massar gave a great talk, I discovered TEDxYouth and have worked for it ever since.

Soccer and Kickball, Fishing and Baking. I'm sure there's something else