Halfway December a group of AEGEE members gathered in Utrecht for the Network Meeting (NWM) ‘Key to your AEGEE future’. It was a weekend full of brainstorming about AEGEE and developing your personal skills: two aspects you need in order to work on the key to your AEGEE future! The amount of sessions and social activities were well balanced, resulting in a productive and inspiring NWM that was very well hosted by AEGEE-Utrecht.
The participants were lodged in the ‘Centre for the World, Peace and Environment’, which sounded already as a suitable location for an AEGEE event. In the course of Friday evening, AEGEE members were arriving mainly from Dutch, Belgian, French and German locals. On behalf of the Comité Directeur (CD), Anna Gots from AEGEE-Kyïv was present to support and contribute to the NWM. Louise Noël, from the partner organization Board of European Students of Technology (BEST), joined the NWM as well.
The first important things was to get to know each other and to have a nice start of our time together in Utrecht. Therefore, a pub crawl was planned, where participants had to battle in groups against each other. Probably, the usual sense of mutual solidarity in AEGEE was even strengthened by the Christmas feeling that was present at all pubs and squares in town.
On the next morning the NWM was kicked off by a session about the Action Agenda Coordination Committee (ACT) and the Strategic Plan. CD member Anna Gots, Ana Potočnik from AEGEE-Ljubljana and Anna van den Berg from AEGEE-Groningen discussed the Action Agenda 2013-2014, which contains the concrete guidelines for AEGEE until August 2014. From the three focus areas, Youth Participation, Bridging Europe and Social Inclusion, aims were discussed and objectives that could be implemented by local boards were highlighted. During the conversation about Bridging Europe, the contribution from Anna Gots about the current situation in Ukraine, and the one from Rasim Zulfigarov (AEGEE-Bakı) about the tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan were very valuable. The overall message was that not only the CD, but also locals can easily implement the objectives of the Action Agenda in their local activities.
Louise Noël gave an introduction about BEST before Mayri Tiido from AEGEE-Tartu started her workshop about teamwork and communication. Don’t think you could have a rest sitting on a chair during that session! By means of small games, exercises and tasks, Mayri Tiido showed the importance of communication and explained you can make a big impact with small changes. Besides, improvisation games were played during this active session in order to trigger the participants’ creativity and to think out of the box.
And, how do you gain and keep enough AEGEE members? How do you gain and transfer the knowledge in your local? According to Dominique Lenssen from AEGEE-Leiden and Tom Simons from AEGEE-Enschede, your local needs a good Human Resources cycle, as they explained during their practical session about HR. As a part of the recruitment step, elevator pitches about AEGEE were developed and practiced. Furthermore, the importance and implementation of the integration of new members, their maintaining and their knowledge transfer steps in the HR cycle were discussed.
Besides, there is no progress in AEGEE without goal-setting. To achieve these goals, you need a good time management and motivation. These elements together formed the topic of the session given by Maartje Natrop from AEGEE-Utrecht, speaker of the AEGEE Academy (ACA). The participants were asked to think about their personal goals in AEGEE in 2014 and to determine the order of their priority. “Time management is not always that easy”, Maartje admitted. Therefore she handed the crucial ingredients for a good time management. With this eye-opening session, we were all ready to achieve our goals in 2014!
It was time for drinks, dinner and a good night out in Utrecht. Even more participants arrived and local members from AEGEE-Utrecht joined as well. It was time to relax and to look back at the inspiring sessions. Eventually it was time to dance together in the historical cellars of Utrecht, located adjacent to canals in the city centre.
On Sunday, already the last whole day of the NWM, we started with a brainstorm session about the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of the locals that were present. Members of the same local gathered together and made a SWOT analysis of their local which they presented to the group. It became clear the locals present have aspects in common but also differ a lot from each other. A weakness that have several locals in common, is a low numbers of (active) members. The presence of many other student associations besides AEGEE was often considered as a threat to the locals. Large differences were observed in the knowledge transfer, the fundraising possibilities, the activity on European level and the number and character of local activities. We could see how other locals are organized and we could learn a lot from each other.
CD member Anna Gots gave an update on the AEGEE Identity presented and ratified during the Autumn Agora 2013 in Zaragoza. She gave an inspiring speech about the importance of our identity and her strong belief in it was convincing and motivating to come in action. During a brainstorming session, the tools, mission and vision of AEGEE were implemented in new elevator pitches.
Do you know all countries in the European Union? Do you know all countries in which you can pay with Euro? Matthijs Overhaal visualized Europe with the help of the participants and explained more details about the history, challenges and future of the EU and the European Parliament. This session was logically followed by a session on the Y Vote 2014 project, given by Léa Charlet from AEGEE-Paris, Project Manager of the Y Vote 2014 project. Léa explained the approach of the project, which aims to motivate and increase the number of young European citizens that will vote during the European Parliament elections taking place in May 2014. We contributed to the program by thinking about ways to promote the project and the elections. How would you motivate young people on the street or at your university to vote?
Iris Hordijk from AEGEE-Utrecht, former speaker of the Environmental Working Group (EnWG) and the current Policy Officer on Sustainability, gave a session on sustainable development. There was a brainstorming session about sustainability in our universities in order to contribute to Iris’ position paper on this same topic.
The final session of the day was offered by the Dutch National Youth Council (NJR). As external trainers, they succeeded very well in implementing many aspects of AEGEE and the NWM in their session. They focused on the planning and structure of projects. The session ended with the question: how would you describe this NWM in one word? Among others, the NWM was labelled as inspiring, different, motivating and awesome.
As an overall impression of the NWM, it can be said there was a good balance between session with an AEGEE topic and sessions about personal development. The NWM has been considered by many participants as very good and productive. There was enough time and space to have discussions, to inspire each other, to make new friends, to have fun and to create lots of memories and new plans.
Thanks to AEGEE-Utrecht, thanks to our Network Commissioner Dominique Lenssen, thanks to all the trainers of this NWM and thanks to all the participants for the inspiring, motivating, awesome event!
Written by Margo van Berkum, AEGEE-Leiden
Pictures taken by Sandrine Lafay, AEGEE-Leiden