AEGEE Day 2020

This year - on April 16th, 2020 - AEGEE-Europe celebrated its 35th anniversary, a landmark date for a pioneer organisation like ours.In the previously formed Core Team of AEGEE Day, we almost instantly had the idea of celebrating such important anniversary, and had the idea of revisiting the meaning of what AEGEE was, is today and can become in the future: here is why and how, we realised to dedicate the thematic topic to #TimeTravel.

Thanks to fruitful cooperation with five other European Bodies, a contentful knowledge transfer with three pioneers of the project, a successful recruitment of three fantastic AEGEE DAY ambassadors, a strong social media campaign and presence and lastly with a series of buzz created by our video trailers; we have been able to get immediate attention from mostly all of the network stuck however, sadly, in the COVID-19 quarantine time.

Indeed - it wasn’t easy to convert an entire booklet supposed to meet real, live actions into an online only based booklet - but luckily the efforts and creativity of our Core Team members and Ambassadors produced incredible results in such a narrow time period. These actions were transformed from live actions into online meetings, online ceremonies, online parties which incredibly showed the creativity and talent of AEGEEans to the very ultimate levels of adaptation and improvisation. Some of the ideas proposed went a bit beyond our renewed “loose boundaries” to come up with innovative ideas the AEGEE DAY 2020 might consider for the next year :)

In fact, over the two weeks from April 11th till April 26th, 2020 - 55 locals representing a total of 1565 people participated with lots of diverse thematic activities and organisational initiatives to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the organisation and reflect the role AEGEE can make us have in our societies.

Written by Luca Bisighini Project Manager of AEGEE Day

Surprisingly, instead of COVID putting our own project under serious threat of being realised, it pushed AEGEEans into believing that something could have been done anyway and we are extremely proud of having been such catalysts.

Also other statistics you can see in our final movie trailer, easily show the multiple records this year’s edition achieved and how a project can be easily turned into a total online based one without losing its appeal.

On May 24th, 2020, also we went together with AEGEE Human Rights Days 2019, to crown the 3 winners of the #Sustainable Trophies, trophies which will be passed hand to hand, every year, from winner to winner, to ensure a legacy in our project. During that night - called the “Night of Champions”, we had over 50 people live, waiting for the winners to be crowned.

The final podium for year 2020 showed the top 3 winners: on 3rd place, we had AEGEE-Utrecht; on 2nd AEGEE-Alicante and on first place, the first ever champions of the project, AEGEE-Valladolid.

They all got a commemorative frame which will remain forever theirs for their achievement, followed by - respectively - a bronze, silver and gold medal.

Beyond this, all 3 locals received the AEGEE DAY Sustainable Trophies, which they need to pass/ship by next year’s Spring Agora 2021 - to the new winners of the next year’s project.

What more to say? We did not have the highest of expectations, but we were certain we could have delivered something great. We made it beyond any of the most optimistic predictions. It was a heck of #TimeTravel. I hope you enjoyed it too.See you in the future of 2021, somewhere, in time.