Young Europeans' Seminar 2008: 'Migration - Living Diversity'
As in previous years, the Young Europeans' Seminar (YES) 2008 took place in Werbellinsee, Germany. The seminar lasted for 5 days (27 June - 1 July) and gathered some 450 YFU exchange students returning from an intra-European exchange year. It gave the participants the opportunity to stay in a neutral place for some time before going back to their home country and to reflect upon their experiences during the last year and their feelings about leaving one home and returning to another. In addition to workshops to facilitate this refelction process, the participants were offered workshops to learn more about the topic of the YES: "Migration - Living Diversity". With this theme the YES 2008 focused on the issue of migration and the challenges and opportunities of living in more and more diverse societies in Europe. On the last day of the YES 2008, the YES parliament -where the YES participants represented their host countries- they were discussing various views and different policy approaches to immigration and integration.
A big thank you goes to YFU Hungary and YFU Romania who were responsible for the content of the YES 2008 as well as to YFU Germany who took good care of the logistics and last but not least to more than 100 European YFU volnteers without whom the YES 2008 would not have been possible.
For more information on the YES 2008, please see http://www.yfu-yes.org.
After several reports being submitted regularly in the earlier phases of the project, on 2 June 2008 EEE-YFU and the European Federation for Intercultural Learning (EFIL) submitted a final report on the Individual Pupil Mobility Pilot Project to the European Commission. Based on all these reports and the recommendations from EEE-YFU and EFIL, the European Commission has begun to develop the structure of the upcoming action which should get under way in 2010.
The Individual Pupil Mobility will be a Comenius sub-programme within the European Commissions Lifelong Learning frame. It will offer European secondary school pupils the chance to spend up to one year as an exchange student at a Comenius partner school.
For more information on EEE-YFU's involvement in the tender, please see the Comenius Individual Pupil Mobility Project section on this website.
International Responsibility Seminar: 'Migration - Living Diversity'
From 11 to 17 April 2008, an International Responsibility Seminar (IRS) was held near Cluj, Romania. In accordance with the Young Europeans' Seminar 2008, the IRS was themed "Migration - Living Diversity". YFU volunteers from 15 countries met to explore and discuss the many facets of migration and it's influences on our society for one week. Many interesting working sessions and the keynote speech delivered by Bashy Quraishy, president of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), provided the participants with knowledge on the topic and prepared them for developing personal action plans on how to use this knowledge in the work of their national YFU organisations. Many of the participants also had a chance to pass on what they had learned to the participants of the YES 2008 as workshop leaders.
EEE-YFU wants to thank the International Organising Team for all the efforts they put into the seminar.
We would also like to say thank you to the participants, whose contributions made it possible to make a small brochure on migration. You can download it by clicking on the image on the right.
European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008
Highlighting that Intercultural dialogue is becoming more and more important in today's diverse societies, the Council of the European Union together with the European Parliament declared 2008 the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue (EYID).
There are events held on the topic in each member state of the European Union and a high number of projects will be carried out by the EYID's partners this year. The main target group of these events will be European youth. As our activities for the most part are about intercultural dialogue and understanding or very much connected to it, also EEE-YFU is among these partners.
In addition, EEE-YFU is a member of the 'Rainbow Platform', a Civil Society platform for intercultural dialogue and Elizabeth Niland, EEE-YFU Director, has been involved in drafting the platform's 'Rainbow Paper' in the run-up to the EYID.
If you wish to have more information on the EYID, please visit http://www.interculturaldialogue2008.eu.
