All Routes Lead to Inclusion, No Matter What

Europe on Track is a project of AEGEE, run by young volunteers who aim to raise awareness, to create a space for discussion and to capture the opinions of youth in Europe on important social issues. The seventh edition of the project even went deeper into the importance of those issues and more specifically social inclusion. As inclusion has various aspects that can be looked into and tackled, we decided to focus on gender equality and mental health. Topics that are surrounded by stigma and stereotypes and quite a lot of myths, but that motivated us, even more, to work on the topic and focus this year’s edition on it. In the past 3 years, AEGEE has been putting a lot of effort and setting a good example of highlighting the inconvenient and unspoken truths about gender issues and that having mental issues doesn’t make you crazy.

It has been a year-long process in preparing every aspect of the project in order to reach out to young people all over Europe and raise awareness on the topic of our edition. We selected 20 AEGEE locals to host our activities and one local to organise our final conference (AEGEE-Leiden), we drafted routes and dreamed about train rides, we interviewed people from all over the world to select the 6 ambassadors to go on the one month journey around Europe, we prepared workshops on the topic and spent 11 amazing and intense days in Moscow, Russia preparing for something that never happened in the end.

Murphy’s law states that “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” and it did. On 12 March, The World Health organisation announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic, which made travelling impossible and dangerous for everyone’s life. This was the moment for our train journey to forcibly leave our plans. However, we are still a voluntary youth-led project and in that sense, the President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, has been quite right in his words that “During these challenging times, young people showed their brilliance. All young people should be proud of themselves.” And we are, as raising awareness can be also done online if you believe your cause is right. We kept our undying love towards train rides and used our motivation and eagerness to show at least a glimpse of all of our planning to the AEGEE network and it was more than we ever dreamed for. It was a great opportunity to become one of the greenest editions of the greenest project of AEGEE and at the same time focus our work on the AEGEE members. The 18 locals who organised online stops with us also showed how the non-travelling issues will not stop them from gaining new knowledge on topics they find important and organise online events to interact with their international friends even though a microphone and a camera. “Europe on Track” proved as a project that talking about gender equality and mental health has been vital in times like these. Both topics have been put to great challenges from disrespecting human rights in some countries, testing the mental health of millions of people around the world who have been staying in their homes to people who have been locked down with their abusive partners with no escape. Nevertheless, we are quite hopeful for the new upcoming edition and we are sure the new team will try their best in making Europe on Track 8 a very special and extraordinary edition.

For the seventh edition, Europe on Track was supported once again by Interrail. And this year the project was funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe thanks to the Annual Work plan of AEGEE-Europe - HerMainY.

Written by Elitsa Hadzhieva Member of Europe on Track Project

During these challenging times, young people show their brilliance.