In the coming weeks you will all be voting for the AEGEE Award Best Project 2012 rewarding the most efficient project of 2011. So the question is who had the most effective project team last year? Over the next weeks, The AEGEEan will try to inspire you to choose a project team that, in your opinion, deserves the award.
First up is the Where Does Europe End (WDEE) project:
What exactly did the WDEE project team do last year, besides getting their flag stolen all the time? Well this question can be answered in an exhaustive report with plenty of details and information, but we know that your time is precious and will therefore focus on informing you about some of the most important work of the WDEE last year: organising a WDEE event in Scandinavia.
Destination: Lund
After organising a successful event in León, Spain, which had been a wish for the project team for a long time, the time came for heading towards to the North with destination Lund. It was the 5th event for the WDEE project which raised the bar even higher for the WDEE project given the high expectations from the demanding participants. This high demand came from the large awareness on the Human Rights subject and the high level of English in the Scandinavian countries.
Tour De Scandinavia
Packing, re-packing and travelling is something that most AEGEEans already can consider one of their expertise, but this especially counts for the participants of this event that visited four cities (Lund, Malmø, Skannor and København) in the duration of six days. They for example walked the dark rainy streets of Lund at 5.30 in the morning when they were on their way to visit the Danish capital. A day in which they were active 21 hours before closing to their eyes again.
“Hi my name is Percin, I’m an exchange student…”
Now getting the famous WDEE questionnaires filled out was not as difficult in Scandinavia as in previous WDEE events such as Spain, but it did take some creativity to get the Swedish and Danish students to use five minutes of their time for an organisation that they had probably never even heard about. How did the WDEE solve this? Easy! They used home-made methods such as entering a class room, interrupting class and pretending to be Erasmus students that were fulfilling a task that the university had given them which resulted in the project team recieving answers from more than 400 Scandinavians.
Expanding and renovation of the project team
The WDEE team chose to expand and renovate their team after a longer standstill and due to some members having to leave the team for different reasons e.g. such as Percin Imrek who stepped from his position as project manager (and became content advisor) because of his his obligations of being Mr. Chair for the EBM Riga and the two Agoras in respectively Alicante and Struga. Juan Sordo from AEGEE-Oviedo replaced him after being elected as the new PM. It is hard to succeed such a hard working person as Percin but Juan managed to do follow the same standards that project founder Percin had set. I have myself attended workshops hosted by both and I do not know if there is some secret recipe within the WDEE project team on how to set up a highly interesting workshop, but I can personally say that the WDEE workshops that I have attended while being in AEGEE have been the workshops in which I have learned the most. Another experienced workshop host and WDEE project team member is Alperen Yavuz from AEGEE-Istanbul who became treasurer and FR of the project after hesitating for a long time to join it. One remarkable quote from an unknown source concerning Alperen joining the team is “Alperen is in WDEE? Then you’re going to be a succesfull project”. A quote which I believe pretty much says it all. Besides Alperen, Juan and Percin the team consists of five more members: Nolwenn Donsimoni (AEGEE-Toulouse), Jovana Milic (AEGEE-Nis), Alicia Quiroga (AEGEE-León), Lavinia Manea (AEGEE-Bucuresti) and Katarzyna Bitka (AEGEE-Krakow). You can find much more information about the project and the team at their blog and their Facebook page. I am sure that they would be more than happy with sharing information, my impression is that they love to talk!
Coming to an end
The WDEE project is coming to an end and is currently in the process of organising their final conference which will take place in Utrecht this May. They have the aim of raising awareness about European identity and issues related to European integration process and have managed to do that through activating non-AEGEEans, including local student communities in the cities of the different project team members’ with the help of AEGEEans from all over the Network.
Best Project 2012?
Why should the WDEE project win the Best Project award 2012? Well the project team did dedicate many hours last year to their beloved project. The number of stories about the WDEE flag getting stolen last year give us an idea about the high number of events in which there was a representant from the project. In these events they used to effort to look deeper into problems of human rights, share their opinions with peers, attract attention of the local population in Scandinavian cities to the topic of human rights and European identity with their street actions, and they have managed to affect AEGEEans to become more active citizens in their respective countries while encouraging their friends to the same.
Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-København