Learn & Share! – The AEGEE-Academy Is Back On Track

Restoring the AEGEE-Academy to its former glory – this has been the main goal of the board of the AEGEE Academy in the past six months and they have ambitious plans to keep working on during this new term.

The Academy has recently hold elections, and their previous board members, Maartje Natrop (AEGEE-Utrecht), Costas Deltouzos (AEGEE-Patra) and Patrick Scholz (AEGEE-Aachen) were re-elected for six more months. However, this time, the number of ‘boardies’ in the ACA has been enlarged from three to six positions, so the Board has been completed by Andra Berilă (AEGEE-Bucureşti), Urša Svetelj (AEGEE-Ljubljana) and Michele Minuti (AEGEE-Brescia). The Mentorship Program has been restored and is proving to be successful, and they have already been working on the image of the Academy and improvement of trainings.

Their agenda before Spring Agora Patra is almost full, and The AEGEEan has spoken with Maartje Natrop, speaker of The Academy, about their plans for this term.

First of all, Maartje, you have just been re-elected as a Speaker of the Academy. Which are the most valuable lessons you have learnt during your first term?

That being idealistic is great, but that this idealism needs to be met by realism! We had so many plans and great ideas but, with just the three of us (Patrick Scholz and Costas Deltouzos who are also reelected and myself), we simply could not manage this. We have spend our entire first term getting the Academy back on track in its most basic form.

Which have been the greatest achievements of the previous board?

To be fairly honest: cleaning up the mess behind the scenes and fixing the not-so-healthy state that we found the Academy in. There is not much to show to the public just yet, but trust me… we have been working hard!

How has the (revived) Mentorship Program been going so far?

Really great actually! Of course, this depends on mentor-trainee couple. The program also relies on the amount of energy and time they put in, but I have heard of many happy trainees so far. The new mentorship guideline with assignments and progress reports surely helps, and of course the Academy responsible for the Mentorship program, Michele Minuti, checks in with the mentors on a regular basis. The whole idea of the program is to make new trainers feel at home within our organisation and to show them we care and we want to guide them trough the process of becoming an experienced trainer. So far, I believe we are on the right track reaching this aim….

What can you tell us about the first meetings with the new board?

Until now we were restricted to Skype. At first I feared how this meetings would go, since we are six: twice as much as the last board! I feared chaos and saw a big challenge ahead for me as leader of the group, but luckily our meetings turned out very efficient, productive and creative. We are also very much looking forward to our official board weekend in the Comité Directeur house in Brussels in January (24-26th).

You are preparing a new database for training materials, what can you tell us about it?

Michele Minuti is not only our Menthorship Program Responsible but also our Database & Knowledge manager. He is very busy collecting as much training material as possible from trainers and creating many standard formats and presentations for trainers. This way we can make the process of preparing training much easier for our trainers. It is also a great way to standardize certain trainings and thus make them uniform. Last but not least, sharing is caring. We want to share our knowledge and not constantly reinvent the wheel! Like our official motto says: The Academy – Learn and Share!

Which other plans do you expect to achieve this term?

We are already proud to announce a new cooperation with the Network Commission, as you might have read in the AEGEE Europe newsletter. Furthermore, Urša Svetelj, our Event and HR manager, has been crazily productive. She made a welcome booklet for new trainers, new application forms, evaluation forms, a new HR strategy and much more. Andra Berilă, our PR responsible, is also a great addition to the team. She just finished an awesome new PR strategy and works on creative designs for a new Facebook page, the booklet and many other communication tools. Patrick Scholz, our financial responsible, is working on new financial guidelines concerning reimbursement for European events, which is also an important step. Last but not least, Costas Deltouzos and myself are working on the new website, which is going to be absolutely awesome. We will launch our first newsletter within a week. It contains an update of our activities, in a pretty design of course. So in short: we are already achieving more than I could have imagined!

We recently found out that the Intercultural Communication European School (ICES) was cancelled. Why is it hard to set up new successful pilots of European Schools?

Well, as always with pilots: they are new so you do not know what to expect. Risks are there to be taken, as I always say: the bird who dares to fall, is the bird who learns to fly. With ICES the organizers were just too late with promotion resulting  in a lack of trainers and participants. However, the concept is great so we are hoping to try again in 2014. SES (Self-development European School) was our pilot in May 2013. Of course some aspects could be improved, but overall it was very succesfull and definitely worth repeating.

You will live an exciting moment in Patra when signing the Convention d’Adhésion. Besides that, is it true that you are planning to propose a change for board members to be elected for a year?

Yes, definitely! We have noticed now (twice already) that half a year is way too little time to actually achieve something. With a proper knowledge transfer period and some time to get to know your fellow ‘boardies’, you are already one or two months further into the process! Plus, being on the Academy board is just way too much fun to give up after half a year. Hard work, hell yeah, but very rewarding and fun!

Does the Academy have any other plans before Spring Agora Patra?

Well yes… drum roll….. to finally show you all the products we have been working on for so long!!! HR booklet, website, new strategies, new Facebook page etc. Although it was not visible yet, we have been working our asses off and cannot wait to share the results with you in 2014! And of course we will bring our cool trainer t-shirts to Patra again, and most of us ‘boardies’ will be there to represent the Academy and show that we are well on our way restoring it to its former glory! And, on a more serious note, we will most definitely focus in 2014 on the quality of the events and how to get more trainers and participants involved and how to avoid cancellations of events. Anyway, I am looking forward to 2014: the year of change.

Written by Anna Gumbau, AEGEE-Barcelona