Here we met Svenja again, running for a second term as Secretary General. Member of AEGEE-Nijmegen since 2012, she already had experience on the European level being Editor of The AEGEEan, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Key to Europe and Secretary of the Agora. Between new ideas and unicorns, she’s ready to step on again and commit for another year for AEGEE. Let’s meet her and find out something more about her candidature!
The AEGEEan: It is not common to run again for the same position. Did you leave many tasks unsolved that you want to catch up for?
Svenja: Before thinking about which position to take, I wanted to decide first of all if I wanted to go for a second year or not, keeping in mind that it is an amazing experience, yet also quite a tiring one, to be honest. In the end, after evaluating the past nine months, bringing up memories and looking at the potential future, I decided that I wanted to continue working for AEGEE. Doing so in other positions have crossed my mind, like those of President and Network Director, but in the end – and I am aware this will sound very cheesy but it is true – I felt that I could do the most for AEGEE in the role of Secretary General since I am already familiar with the tasks, I actually enjoy most of them (saying I like all of them would be way too cheesy, she laughs, ed) and I knew there weren’t other interested candidates in the position.
As for my tasks, at the beginning of the year I had some ideas in mind of what I wanted to achieve during the year and I’ve done my best to do so. At the same time, I got to know AEGEE a lot better this year, which gave me new plans and ideas for things to work on. If I am elected for a second term, I would like to work on these new things next to my regular tasks.
Improving the communication between CD and members is sometimes hard. This year you started sending monthly CD decisions to the network. Why was it hard to do it before? Next step would be to send them at the beginning of the upcoming month. Can you commit to this engagement?
The communication between the Comité Directeur and the Network can indeed be hard sometimes. One of the things I wanted to try this year to improve the communication was to send the CD decisions monthly, so the decisions described would still be fresh in the members’ memory, and the CD decisions would be shorter in total, which is a factor that can be more important than you’d expect [she laughs, ed.].
Personally, I like sending the minutes out every month, because it’s also easier for me to recap what happened during meetings of the past month rather than the past three months. Right now, I try to send them within the first two weeks of the month already, but I would be happy to send them at the beginning of the month too.
Given the huge amount of mails you receive daily, what’s the realistic average time you need to answer all mails? Is there anything you will do to make sure that your fellow CD members will answer promptly to the mails you receive on headoffice@aegee.org?
One of the things I have grown used to this year is receiving a lot of mails, so much so that I actually don’t consider my mailbox ‘full’ anymore until it passes the 100, which luckily doesn’t happen so often because I am a bit addicted to checking my mail. If I am not out of office – and even then sometimes – I normally reply to mails within a couple of hours to a day maximum, although there are always exceptions, of course.
If mails have to be answered by other members of my team, I add them to the conversation directly so both the sender and CD member are aware who is supposed to reply. For urgent topics, I normally also send a personal reminder to the member involved so they can get back to the mail as soon as possible. For this, it helps that we are all in the same office and I can easily walk to someone’s desk to ask them to reply to something!
A few members of your current CD are, as you are, running again for a second term. How do you think your election (as existing team) may affect the next CD in terms of teamwork?
Having been in the same team already with some people will of course mean that I know them better, yet at the same time one of the newly elected CD members could have also been my best friend since kindergarten (not the case, sadly), which might also have an impact on the team. I think that in the end it is more important that everyone is willing to give an effort to build a team together and get to know each other, while giving everyone an equal chance. From my side, I am happy to work with anyone and I would look more than forward to getting to know and working with all my future team members.
Related to the previous question, you are in charge of the internal 
management of the team. How do you think elections will affect the rest of the term of your current CD?
We have discussed this topic and we all agreed that no matter what happens, we will finish our term in the best way possible, making sure that we achieve our aims and provide the new team with a good knowledge transfer.
You would like to investigate the possibility of hiring an Office Director. Which tasks do you think you could/should delegate? And why do you think it’s necessary to have a paid position for the tasks you are already managing now on a voluntary basis?
At the moment, AEGEE is hiring several employees to work on the external projects, like EUth and GR-EAT, that we are involved in. These projects give a great contribution to the work of AEGEE, but also come with a great amount of work dealing with the staff members, including creating their contracts, salary sheets, other administrative tasks and the supervision of their work. Right now, it is the Secretary General who takes care of these tasks, but at the same time (s)he also has to manage a lot of other tasks, resulting in a huge portfolio which would be enough work for two people.
Seeing that in many other organisations there is actually a separate person hired to deal with staff members only, I would like to explore the opportunities to have a person like this for AEGEE too to give the Secretary General more time to work on internal tasks of AEGEE. This person would work with the staff members (so the contracts, salary sheets, administration and general supervision of their work etc.), but could also help out with other administrative tasks, like taking care of the visa invitation letters we provide to members coming to the house, creating certificates and making the booklets for the Agora.
In your opinion, shall the Secretary General have a more thematic role or take over all the administrative tasks?
I think this would be up to each Secretary General to decide based on their experiences and preferences, but ideally there would be a combination of both tasks. The Secretary General is not only a Secretary, even if many people seem to think so, but also a full member of the Comité Directeur and therefore it would be good if (s)he also works with the thematics or more 
organisational aspects of AEGEE. In the end, even if I would like it to be the case, no one joins AEGEE with the lifelong dream to move to Brussels and only answer 300 mails a day and take minutes [she laughs, ed.].
You are the CD member who most of all deals with bureaucracy and administration. From your point of you, do you think we are hyper bureaucratic, as more and more people are lamenting? In case we are, how would you ease it?
It is true that AEGEE has a lot of rules and procedures, yet at the same time I also think they are needed to function as an organisation as big as ours. Therefore, before cutting out any rules or procedures, I would want to take a look at why we have them, and how the same results can be achieved with less rules or procedures. At the same time, having rules does not stop us from going out of the box and make space for bold ideas that don’t follow the rules. Sometimes, you just need to do it rather than think and talk about it, and there is always a way for that, even if it may look impossible.
One of your roles is also to organise statutory events together with the Chair Team, JC and local organisers and you were also in charge of the Agora Reform task force. What do you think is the main change you brought and what you want to change in your next term?
The Agora Reform taskforce has been working on ideas for changes over the past months, of which some will be implemented at Agora Bergamo. I want to give them all the credit for that though, because they truly did an amazing job and my role was mostly to follow their work and of course start the task force! I am very happy to see the results of the task force after having had progress meetings on the topic for some years, and I would like to continue working with the task force in the upcoming year to make sure we continue to improve the Agora.
Besides that however, I would also like to take a look at the European Planning Meeting and how to shape it, because I think the current form is
not ideal and there is space for improvement. I have already started discussing this topic with my current team, and I would like to continue the discussion with my new team if I am elected again.
QUESTIONS FROM OUR READERS
If you could only make one big change in AEGEE’s current state, what would you want it to be and how would you contribute to it in the position you are running for?
I spent way too much time thinking about this – there are a lot of things that can be changed, yet at the same time a lot of things we should keep the way it is. However, if I have to pick one thing, it would be a change in our big annual gatherings, the statutory events. Seeing that these events gather the most members, I would like to maximize their impact on members by focussing less on organisational matters and more on inspiring and teaching them. I’d hope that this new inspiration and information would then also be shared with the locals, thus inspiring and teaching the whole Network. Since the Secretary General is normally responsible for statutory events, I would contribute to that by continuing to work with the Agora Reform task force and thinking of ways together with my team to reform the way we use our statutory events.
In your candidature you said that you want to work with the
Network again, even though you are running for Secretary General. How would you structure the work of the CD based on the Network’s needs? If you could give an advice to the future Network Director which one would it be?
We indeed have a Network Director in the team, but I think all members of the Comité Directeur should work directly with the Network. To be able to work for and with the Network, like we want to do, we should first be aware what this Network exactly wants, and I think this is too big of a task for one person alone. I would therefore recommend the future Network Director to make use of the fact that there are seven people in the team coming directly from and able to work with the Network, and to investigate together what can be done for and with the Network.
Was your team aware that you decided to rerun?
Yes, I informed them that I was considering to rerun while I was thinking about it, and I shared my final decision before submitting my candidature.
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And last but not least: how many unicorns did you bring in the CD house so far? And how many shall we expect in case you’ll be re-elected?
Not enough! I hope that you can expect more if I’m re-elected, because apparently my love for (rainbow) unicorns is not really a secret anymore [she laughs, ed.].
You can read her full candidature here and the article about her portfolio here.
Written by Alfredo Sellitti, AEGEE-Salerno