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.

Member Benefits

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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

with Dojoko in order to launch ELSA’s Membership Platform at the start of the next academic year, making it accessible to all of our members.

Diversity & Inclusion

One of the main goals we set this term has been to research ways in which ELSA can be more diverse and inclusive to its members. Through our Internal Meetings, we worked on raising awareness on the topic of diversity and inclusion within our Network. We introduced the topic early in the term and allowed for an open discussion and brainstorming on what could be improved in this area. Following the suggestions of the Network, we worked on developing our Code of Conduct by broadening its impact and reach in our Network to allow for a safe environment during our international events. With the organisation of the LXXXI International Meeting Cosenza in a physical format, we were able to see your efforts come to a reality, by presenting and implementing the new and improved version of the Code of Conduct.

Alumni

Last but not least, our community is also composed of the members that actively contributed to our Association in the past and made it where it is today: our Alumni. Thus, we organised in common initiatives such as the 40th Anniversary of ELSA. Through these initiatives, we got our Alumni closer to our members and rekindled the connection between our Association after two years of distance and online activities.

In addition to the involvement in our projects, we also emphasised engaging with our Alumni in what concerns the daily management of ELSA. We got the support of some of our Alumni in getting us closer to important institutions, such as the EU Commission, with whom we have met. Furthermore, we were also able to expand the sources of fundraising of ELSA, thus reinforcing our financial sustainability. Lastly, during the last days of our term we were able to welcome one of our Alumni as new Patron of ELSA: Siniša Rodin! It is an honour to count on his support and we hope his connection to the Association stays for many years to come. Lastly, none of this could have been done without the support of some important Alumni and for that we would like to thank Agnieszka Stobiecka-Kuik, Johanna Kaupinnen and Eero Rauhtalati for all they did to support us. It was a phenomenal year, and it could not have been this way without all of your efforts.