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Autumn IFISO Meeting, Istanbul, Turkey
IFISO & ESTIEM Istanbul
IFISO & ESTIEM Istanbul
7th – 11th October, 2010
During second weekend of October 2010, I went to represent AEGEE to the bi-annual IFISO meeting in Istanbul. You may wonder – what is IFISO? Well, IFISO is The Informal Forum of International Student Organizations and it is a forum aimed to gather different students NGOs together. IFISO, even as an informal forum, it is still quite influential because it creates the necessary environment for international student organisations to collaborate on all possible levels in order to strengthen their capacities through knowledge sharing and identification of synergies.
Autumn IFISO meeting 2010 was in Istanbul, organized by local ESTIEM group. There were 12 NGOs present – AEGEE, BEST, ESTIEM, EPSA, EFPSA, ESN, IFSA, IVSA, EESTEC, IAAS, IFMSA, IPSF.
Content-wise, meeting was very fruitful. We started on Thursday; welcome evening was mostly about getting to know each other and team-building of the group. During three working days from Friday to Sunday, we managed to discuss a lot of important topics – mainly about cooperation between NGOs (already existing and also plans for the future). Then we had several sessions during which we discussed other very important topics – fundraising (company FR and institutional FR), organization of IFISO meetings, communication and administration of IFISO mailing list.
Very useful was also Open Space Technology – we tackled topics as IFISO logo and website, joint engineering competition, electing new boards and knowledge transfer, local IFISO cooperation, training system, visa issue, motivation of members. We had a lot of fruitful discussions on every single topic.
Important part of the event was also dedicated to LSS (Leadership Summer School) – high quality training event, organized in summer as one of the most successful joint IFISO initiatives. We had brainstorming session about how we can improve whole organization of LSS and what should be done in future in order to keep high quality of this training and involve even more NGOs.
Another important thing is that AEGEE was elected as the host of next IFISO meeting in spring 2011 – applications are still open!
So in general, meeting was very fruitful, we were working hard whole day every day, in rainy and cold Istanbul, but people were great, atmosphere very open and friendly. And it is always refreshing to meet members of other NGOs to get a bit different point of view on things and learn a lot from each other. So I can say that I consider this meeting as successful and I can´t wait to take a challenge of organizing next one – in spring 2011.
By Miroslava Ganzarcikova, Comité Directeur 2010/2011