Report & Results: Attendance of the Conference
“The Art of Developing Global Perspectives Together Education for Sustainable Development in non-formal education and international youth work” Frankfurt, 07.-08. November 2012
organized by:
From 07.-08. November 2012, I attended a conference organized by IJAB, the International Youth Service of the Federal Republic of Germany. I attended because I found it relevant to the educational content of IJB, especially as it dealt with our Content Area of the year for 2012, Sustainable Development (SD) The keynote speaker (Dr. Philip Schepelmann, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy) spoke on education’s challenge of turning awareness into action, something very relatable to IJB. He also stressed three elements of SD: efficiency in regard to social costs, for example minimizing waste in various branches of the economy 1
Resource
efficiency1 consistency2 sufficiency3
the challenge of integrating material and production cycles into each other, rather than running them parallel to one another 2
the ability to restrain from something, in this case unnecessary consumption 3
The conference participants then split into groups to discuss different topics and work on possible activities concerning the theme. a. Food on international financial markets & “landgrabbing” b. Germany’s “Energy Turn” from nuclear power to renewable energies c. Lifestyle and consumption choices I chose (a), as I saw it as an interesting combination of our yearly content areas for 2012-13: Sustainable Development (2012) and Human Rights (2013). These groups worked together for the rest of the day and presented their results the following day in the format of a “speaker’s corner” - One speaker represented each group in the conference plenary, while all other participants could go from speaker to speaker. I think this format is also useful for larger JB meetings. Here are two main questions I took home concerning IJB and our educational content: • How can we smoothly transition from Sustainable Development (2012) to Human Rights (2013) in the next months? • In addition to raising awareness with our educational activities, how can we improve on emphasizing taking action in IJB? I’d love to hear your thoughts! I urge all NJRs, Regional Team members and IJB Committee members to attend similar conferences on behalf of your NA or IJB. Thank you to IJB for funding my participation and Jess/GB for informing me about the conference.