Mediation Commissioner for 57th Agora AEGEE-Europe
Natascha Jürgens believes in the power of conflict solving in order to improve situations. Empathy, active listening, and neutrality are some of her musts when it comes to mediation. Although she joined AEGEE last year, she’s already a member of the YDWG and very enthusiastic about our organization. Let’s see what motivates Jürgens to run for the Mediation Commissioner position!
Tell us a bit about yourself. What’s your AEGEE story and what made you join?
What made me join AEGEE in the first place was the advertisement of the Summer Universities and the prospect of meeting and talking to young people from all over Europe. I started to go to the weekly meetings of my local and slowly became more involved with taking some organisational responsibilities there. After I visited my first European event, I became completely infected with the AEGEE spirit and the urge to do more and more for our organisation. This motivated me to join many more fun and thematic events and I become a member of the YDWG this term.
What inspired you to submit your candidature for the Mediation Commission?
It’s incredibly important to solve conflicts in order to achieve anything and I would like to help with this crucial task. This would also pose a personal challenge for me. Conflict is in my opinion important for improvement: when you work together to solve a conflict, every party involved learns new things and grows with it.
As we can appreciate in your Motivation speech, you have a wide knowledge of communication through your degree and several AEGEE events. Which of your skills would you define as the most important one, the one that makes you different from other candidates?
I think one of the essential skills that I can bring with me is the patience to want to understand every point of view in an argument and not reach any conclusions prematurely.
If you were elected, there may be some conflicts that you would have to solve. Have you ever found yourself in a mediation situation before? If so, how did you react or how would you recommend people to behave?
In the experience that I have had, if you want to solve a conflict, a change of perspective is very important in order to reevaluate the situation. Often conflict is a failure of communication and you need to break open fixed viewpoints of the people involved. You can follow the steps of first listening to each other and then evaluating the situation again. In order to achieve this, you should have fixed rules in your negotiation: Each point of view should be explained, the different parties need to change their perspective and explain what they would expect from the other(s) to come to a resolution.
How do you reckon an ideal Mediation Commission member should be?
I think the most important quality that a member of the Mediation Commission should have is also the most difficult thing: neutrality. No matter how emotional and relatable it is when someone tells you about their problems, you can’t let yourself be pulled into the conflict, and you need to be aware of your role that you are there solely to mediate and nothing else.