Journey of a Focus Area: Three years of Youth Development

Written by Evita Ločmele and Alejandra Piot Member of Youth Development Working Group

Youth Development was chosen as one the four Focus Areas of AEGEE at Agora Chisinau 2016. The main aim of the Focus Area was “to provide young people with opportunities to gain transversal skills and competences that contribute to their personal and professional development.”

These three years have been full of excitement and improvements for our organisation. Our members had the chance to get to know which soft skills they are getting just for being involved in AEGEE actively, such as leadership (main organisers of Summer Universities) or teamwork (anyone working within a board or European body). There was a policy paper written on the importance of transversal skills and competences for young people in modern Europe during the year 2017/2018.

We wanted to unite all AEGEEans and to apply teamwork skill

During the year 2018/2019, the need for some mental health education was raised. The Agora voted for an objective within the focus area related to the topic, and the members of the working group didn’t hesitate in starting to work on it. They created a booklet on Mental Health, highlighting terms, processes, and to try to break the stigma. These was a good first step for our year, 2019/2020 to continue working on the topic as much as we could. We had the chance to deliver workshops at two different Network Meetings and to continue spreading the word on the topic.

Quite closely related to this, we had an objective related to physical health and an idea came to our mind: creating a challenge to go from Barcelona (place where the European Planning Meeting took place) to Yerevan (where the upcoming general assembly was supposed to happen) walking. Of course, not literally speaking, we wanted to unite all AEGEEans, and apply the teamwork skill mentioned above and walk that distance in the amount of time remaining between one event and the other. Unfortunately for us, the global pandemic happened and, in several countries, it was forbidden to go out completely, but that didn’t discourage us to call upon AEGEEans to keep themselves physically and mentally healthy during those hard moments.

The Youth Development Working Group and AEGEEans from all around the network tackled a lot of topics - from mental and physical health to entrepreneurship. They showed a presence on social media and raised awareness on important days of the year, such as World Health Day, International Day of Education and International Volunteer Day. And they cooperate with other European Bodies of AEGEE and participated in different initiatives, such as Human Rights Day 2019, together with a lot of other Bodies and Locals all across the AEGEE network.

We are really happy with the results of these three-years’ work, and we wish the best of luck to the new working groups.