Alone at 18: Agevolando's Care Leavers and the Network They Built on Their Own

The story opens with different voices. A young woman recalls that as a child she had "other problems" and that her life was very far removed from dancing. She then describes a specific moment, which she calls "a crushing blow": from then on, she says, it was just her, and she would have to make it on her own. A man, who later turns out to be the president of Agevolando, remembers the many peers and fellow residents of his care home who ended up on the street, with drug addiction and petty crime.

This dual perspective runs through the entire film. On one side is the personal struggle of those leaving the care system. On the other is the very real risk, witnessed firsthand, of what happens to those left without support.

The young woman explains that she always has to wear a mask. At work or at university, people don't know who she really is. She describes her story as her vulnerable side, her "Achilles' heel." At the same time, she considers it very precious, with a value that others perhaps could not understand. For her, handing it over to someone means entrusting them with a jewel that the person could pick up and throw away, and that could hurt her and make her feel very bad.

The theme of shame and of living in two worlds, the care home on one side and life outside on the other, returns at the end of the documentary in the collective words of the care leavers.

The same young woman meets Giorgio, a point of reference within Agevolando, to take stock of her situation: university, her path, her plans. She says he helps her a lot when she needs to talk to someone. He always offers her a positive, optimistic perspective, and she needs people like that because she describes herself as someone who has always been very pessimistic.

At a café, Giorgio asks her how she imagines being alone now that she is about to move out on her own, after years of living with other people. She admits that part of it scares her. But there is also a bit of adrenaline: she got to this point by herself, through her own efforts.

To explain her relationship with instability, she uses a seafaring image. Most people live "on dry land" because they have never known a roller-coaster life, and that is why they feel sick when they find themselves among the waves. For her it is the opposite: she feels bad when she is still, when things are stable, because she isn't used to it.

Alongside the individual stories, the association's financial fragility comes to light. The president explains that this year there is a very serious problem: about €200,000 is still missing to cover the costs of the current year. They have to move fast, because if those funds are not found, they risk having to shut down projects and lay people off.

In staff meetings, they organize training sessions and an event in Turin scheduled for May 18, for which the association is working with Croas. At the time of filming there is still no venue: some have said no, others kept the association hanging until the last minute. One staff member says she is very happy with her work and calls it "regenerative," precisely because there is always direct contact with the young people: "we gather what the kids bring to us."

The stated goal of the event is to involve policymakers, meaning key figures at the institutional level who can take up the young people's demands and take responsibility for real change. The appeal is put in very direct terms: these are "our children too," children of society, Italian or foreign, the same age as the listeners' own children, eighteen-year-olds as each of us once was. Hence the question: how can we abandon them and leave them alone, without adequate support?

One of the central moments is a workshop in which the care leavers represent their lives graphically as a line, with its knots, its falls and its climbs. The young woman struggles to identify clearly positive or negative periods: for her, there have always been "lights and shadows." Her childhood, she says, was normal until she was four. Around the age of eleven she marks the decline. She acknowledges that she was certainly unwell, but perhaps didn't realize it, because she loved her mother and so there was hope.

She also shares a memory that contradicts what she had expected. She imagined she had spent her nights in the care home trying to convince the staff that she needed to go back to her mother for her own good. In reality, she slept very well: even though she wasn't happy, her body was fine, certainly better than before. She admits, though, that she isn't entirely satisfied with how she managed to depict it.

The workshop leader explains the purpose of the exercise. When you are inside one of those knots, you see things too close up and can't see them clearly. Being able to tell them allows those going through that situation right now to find "a crack of possibility, a survival strategy." In the end, the young woman is the first to speak in front of the group. She says the only anxiety she felt was about starting, because she is usually focused on what others might think. This time, she says, she stayed calm.

The president of Agevolando returns to the places of his childhood, in the middle of the woods, and confesses that he always gets emotional when he goes there, because he thinks about his story, his family, his home and above all his childhood. There he meets up with Federico, his friend since nursery school. The first memory they have of each other is Federico's long hair, which his friend would pull while they played.

The president explains why that bond is so special. When something very intense happens to you and you tell it to someone who hasn't lived through it, they don't fully understand. With Federico, on the other hand, all it takes is a look to feel the same thing. "We became family to each other," he says: they were a bit of a dad, a bit of a mom and a bit of a best friend to one another, in a bond he describes as deeply visceral. Federico, we learn, missed the mountains and the woods. Together they look at the highest mountain in the area, at 2,200 meters, while they stand at between 1,300 and 1,350.

The president describes how his work began. He realized the importance of the transition at 18 when he saw that young people coming of age were going through the same difficulties and the same fears he had experienced at their age. From there came the desire to do something more for them. He says he always finds his motivation in the results: he sees that the young people are doing better. His other source of energy is his family and his wife.

About his wife, he says that from their very first meeting he had a "gut feeling" that she was a very sensitive person he could trust. He describes himself as a wary person who feels this way about few people. That is exactly why that impression gave him peace of mind and a sense of security. As he got to know her better, he understood that he could tell her his story.

With the children, the conversation is more delicate. The kids know that their father didn't have a dad and that from ages 10 to 18 he lived away from home, in a care home. But they don't know the reasons and many other things, which will be told to them "in due time." His wife explains this as parents' desire to protect their children from difficult and painful things, which she considers a natural inclination of parenthood. The timing hasn't been decided yet: maybe in a year, maybe sooner, maybe in two. They are still thinking it over.

For the president, becoming a father was an enormous emotion, as if he had been given the chance to build a new story, different from his own. One of his children, for their part, already knows what their father does: "My dad is the president of Agevolando and he helps kids."

Another story concerns a young woman and a couple who speak of her as a daughter. Looking through photos, the woman recalls the hardest period: the girl was very angry at the whole world, including at them and at her father. She describes it as a "tough" time and speaks of a very demanding personality, but also of "incredible" emotional intelligence. She compares that period to a friend's experience of giving birth, who says she no longer remembers the pain. She, too, when she thinks about it, no longer has that painful memory: above all, she sees how much the girl has grown, and she is extremely proud of what she is doing.

The young woman confirms it was one of the darkest moments of her life: she felt herself sinking and hitting rock bottom, and from there she could only climb back up. And climb back up she did. She says she was the best daughter she could be, and that she probably couldn't have done more. She had a lot of trauma and unresolved experiences from the past. It was hard for her to find herself in a home, to know that she had a family and that she was supposed to be happy, because she wondered how to erase everything that had come before. She concludes that you take a person "as a whole," with the complete package of positive and negative sides: that family also saw her darkest sides, and that is normal.

The film then follows a national gathering of care leavers. One young woman says she is happy and excited to see the group again. Everyone introduces themselves and reads a question. Aisha says she hasn't had a drink in a year. Among the questions asked is one about the rights of a care leaver who spends time in a psychiatric clinic. There is also one about the usefulness of these meetings themselves. Aisha adds that for her, by now, "that's done," and that she would like to do something concrete to help care leavers who are entering the adult world and who, like her, don't know where to turn.

Another participant says she feels at ease and knows the young people better, to the point of feeling "in her comfort zone." The president, watching the young people having fun together, says he thought about how far they have come and how much satisfaction all of this gives him.

The culmination is a public event at which the care leavers read a collectively written text in front of hundreds of people. One young woman, who says she is a bit dyslexic, hopes her reading will be convincing because she would like the system to change: no one should ever again have to go through what they have experienced firsthand. Someone recalls situations in which "we didn't even know that children were supposed to eat three times a day."

The text is divided into chapters.

• The rupture. A care leaver's journey often begins with a sharp rupture. Having arrived at care homes at different times, the young people came to understand what they would have wanted from a care worker: someone who knows how to listen, who gets you to talk, who asks you how you feel and what you would like to do.
• Difference and shame. The sense of being different never completely left them, especially at school, where they felt inferior to others, "almost disgusting." Telling people outside that they lived in a care home was hard: they were ashamed and afraid of being made fun of. For a long time, the care home and life outside remained two separate worlds.
• Coming of age. Many professionals simply applied the rule that, now that they were adults, it was up to them. The young people grew up learning to be strong for themselves, even turning anger into a tool for not giving up. In the end, what was missing was someone to guide them gently.

An adult in attendance calls them "heroes." In his view, anyone put in front of hundreds of people to lay out their life experience would find it extremely hard. They do it with effort, but with a strong sense of duty, to keep anyone else from having to go through what they went through. He knows each of their stories, one by one, but every time he hears them again he is moved: by the strength they have in seeing the positive and in taking their lives into their own hands to turn them into good lives. One of the readers says that there, she felt seen and heard.

The president sets out the association's long-term goal. He hopes the State will guarantee that young people are accompanied, listened to and supported until they become independent. Until that happens, he says, they won't stop. Then there will be other needs, perhaps even outside Italy, and they will try to work in that direction too.

The last word goes to a young care leaver. She finds it absurd that for your whole life up to 18 you are "a problem to be managed" for the State, and then, once you come of age, the State tells you that now you have to fend for yourself. It isn't fair, she concludes, and she hopes there will truly be changes for the next care leavers.