MEMBER ENGAGEMENT
FRANCISCO ARGA E LIMA President
ELSA is fundamentally a network of students and young lawyers from all over Europe that identify themselves under our Vision of a just world in which there is respect for human dignity and cultural diversity. We are a community of people from different backgrounds, nationalities, cultures and beliefs. As such, the reason for ELSA to exist is to provide opportunities to its members to develop themselves and to shape their future in the way that they deem best. Without our members, ELSA ceases to exist. For that reason, this year we took their interests to heart and took our best efforts to provide them with the tools they need to develop personally and professionally.
Additionally, making ELSA an inclusive association was also an essential point of our term, and one of our contributions was given through the free access to Speechify’s services, which allow users to listen to the written text on their computers, in case they have any have visual or reading impairments. Furthermore, we also aimed to support the trainees of ELSA Traineeships and students that enrol on international exchange programmes. For that reason, we started cooperating with Spotahome and HousingAnywhere with the purpose of giving our members discounted prices when planning their medium to long-term stays in another country.
Member Benefits
Lastly, but not less important, as an international organisation, languages are an essential element of our lives, especially English. For that reason, through our cooperation with SkypeLanguageSchool.net, we can bring affordable online solutions to our members to develop their language skills in English or any other languages they may be interested in.
One of the priorities we took this year was to provide concrete and useful benefits to our members, both to those that work directly with ELSA through our National and Local Groups, as well as those that are first getting acquainted with our Association. With these goals in mind, we got new technical supporters for our travel and accommodation needs - Diversity Travel and Accor Hotels. With these two new partners, the entire Network can easily access good quality travel management and accommodation services for their physical events. On the other hand, we also introduced cooperation with Grammarly to our Groups, providing them with a way to improve our English correspondence and make our internal documents more professional.
When it comes to access to legal courses and scholarships, it was our pleasure to continue the cooperation with CBL International and Europrivacy, bringing their courses and benefits closer to our members, especially in the after-COVID era, where we are again able to promote summer school programmes such as the ones provided by CBL. Similarly, we started cooperating with the Academy of the Global Association of Data Protection Professionals, which provided substantial discounts on their data protection courses.
Regarding the benefits provided to our audience in general, we divided our priorities into two segments: special access to services and special access to legal courses. Regarding the first of these priorities, we aimed to develop relationships with service providers that are important for our community. Thus, we focused on fitness and health services, with a partnership with Freeletics, accessible to all members of ELSA. Furthermore, we also focused on more ecological and budget-friendly travel solutions, thus cooperating with Flixbus and Flixtrain. ANNUAL REPORT
Member Platform Another important objective of our term related to our community was to create a membership platform through which our members could engage with each other and get updates regarding ELSA’s activities all over Europe. Throughout the term, we have researched different tools to accomplish this goal. At the end of this process, we are proud to have started cooperation 4
