Proposed methodology (that has been imported from Latin America in Italy with great success since 2005) is the

“Ludopedagogy” is a method which did develop to fight against Latin America dictatorships summing the strategic element of "playing" to the experience of Freire's Popular Education to advocate and promote a society based on the respect of human dignity and freedom, building awareness for Human Rights and the capacity to work for a human scale development, that is sustainable and based on participation.

The method has been imported from Latin America in Italy with great success since 2005 by Ariel Castelo and Valentina Pescetti on behalf of the Center La Mancha and the ReLaJo and have been experimented succesfully as well in Russia, Egipt and Saharawi Refugees Camps by ReLaJo Italia and the association "Le barbe della Gioconda" who is the only reference association of the "Latin América Network of Game" - Red Latinoamericana de Juego - ReLaJo - Autorized for the promotion of Ludopedagogy by the Centre for Training and Investigation La Mancha. This method facilitates the educational work, by involving the participants and encourages the opening towards a different attitude, different from the usual one, stimulates the curiosity and the necessity to recognize the different, the “other”. The “game” manages to develop the willing to get in to it, to actively participate, to risk, to discover yourself and the world around you, to discover the power to build another possible and necessary world.

To pursue these aims, the Association did (in the past beeng the italian branch of the "Latin América Network of Game" - Red Latinoamericana de Juego - ReLaJo) and will now carry on, among others, the following activities: to organize seminars, conferences, pedagogical courses and trainings; to establish relations of collaboration with other Italian and foreign organizations, having local, national and international nature, with similar aims, to mutually exchange best practices and facilitate contacts among the organizations themselves.

Finally, "Le barbe della Gioconda" is willing to promote the power of playing in order to build a different kind of participation.

The main objectives of the activities are:

To strengthen the capacities of public institutions and local associations working on social issues and dedicated to people participation by training their staff and volunteers (trainers, teachers, rights promoters) on the basis of  "Ludopedagogy as a strategic tool for social work and participation".

To promote the exchange of best practices and the cooperation between organisations of different countries which are working with or are willing to implement participative methodologies in order to better involve and train people as promoters of intercultural dialogue and peaceful transformation of conflicts with a human rights perspective.

The courses and training sessions in “Ludopedagogy” is using a no formal and experiential methodology, aim to strength the strategic capacities to empower people participation on subjects like: emigration, exclusion and discrimination; wars, violence and violations of the Human Rights; contexts of privatization and weaknesses of the Social State, principally concerning the right to education and health; the abuse of the authorities and the gender and generational discrimination; barriers and conflicts; consumerism, corruption and imposition of a kind of development purely economic, that is not sustainable nor at an environment level nor at a social level for the discriminated and poor classes.

The basic training course on Ludopedagogy as a tool for Participation (structured in several progressive sessions) aims to contribute in building up the local capacities (of institutions and organized civil society) to promote the active citizenry, the conscience of the causes of the problems, the taking on of the responsibilities and the value of the intercultural diversity, as a social fabric capable to host the hope of building, all together, a world that looks, respects and appreciate itself like a complex and fertile interaction of the multiplicity and the diversity.

As Education, Games can never be neutral. The training courses for an initial acquisition of Ludopedagogy as a strategic tool for social work and participation point at facilitate a process to experience and then analyse and try to practice the mechanism of playing. Every participant will arrive to the ability to listen to, accept and understand, viewpoints which diverge from one’s personal viewpoint passing trough the experience of discovering the possibility in oneself a different perspective. The methodology of Ludopedagogy allows to recognize the value of emotions and body and affectivity in order to better understand ourselves, the relations and the reality.

Based on the potentialities of playing as a metaphor and vehicle of knowledge, this educative method sums the individual experience and understanding to the collective analysis, opening the possibilities to try and develop, in a protected space - the playing space - different and unusual solutions to social issues. This represent a strategic tool to promote and reveal the potentialities of a true participation of social sectors usually excluded or marginalized (as young people, migrants, Rom, children, rural or not working women) and help a more open attitude to the social sectors that are used to decision making and which don’t want to get “mixed up” (adults and old people with difficulties to accept the “foreigners”).