Big Fun + Hard Work + Nice Island = Magusa!!

SuFu Team is back from Magusa!! What a wonderful and exciting Agora we had, with nerves, a true presidental election for first time in years, the Agora expressing its opinion towards the CD work adn some other issues... If you were not there, you missed something great! SuFu Panda tried to keep people updated at the live agora website (thanks Chair Team for trying hard to make it real).


There was a nice workshop organized by SuFu, where our Danube girls presented the initiative. It was due to rush of plennary that workshops were not properly presented in front of all the delegates, so we didn't get as many interested people as we would have liked to. Be we had quality instead of quantity! They were participative and creative, and developed the project with their contribution. We want to thank all of them and hope to see YOU in one of our events (or in both!).

Other interesting things:

• The Finding Sustainland SU from AEGEE Ankara was actively promoted by their organizing team, and it looks really great!
• We have chosen a new flagship Topic, Beyond Europe, to be developed soon into a concrete project. I want to encourage the proposers to be ambitious, idealistic, positive and... good luck!!
• Logistically it was again a perfect event, thanks to hard work from AEGEE-Magusa people, and the support of Near East University. Good food, big parties, and the AEGEE neighbourhood (a different kind of hosting. I just think that the people from Magusa should learn how to wake up people). Happy 10th, AEGEE-Magusa!! The cake was great!
  
• People from Kyiv were already doing some FR for their univeristy with nice calendars. With each one you could also ask for a wish: mine was to see Dragan dressed up as SuFu Panda in Agora Kyiv, and I bought 5 calendars to increase my chances - the nice pictures of Kyiv girls had nothing to do, for sure :) . If you have an opportunity to ask for wishes, think about it... It could be so much fun! (Sorry Dragan if you read this)

That is all for now, from Morocco, the SuFu Panda.

PS: While we wait for more pics from our workshop, I borrowed some pics from Facebook, "thanks" to their owners for their understanding :)

makeITfair Amsterdam Youth Roundtable ‘09

I have recently represented SuFu and AEGEE at the makeITfair Youth Round Table in Amsterdam, an event organized by SOMO Netherlands, Dutch National Youth Council and “ Morgen” (the national student network of the Netherlands on Sustainable Development).

One general focus of the round table was to actively involve youth organizations in spreading the word on better working conditions & sustainable environmental impact of electronic industry.

As a campaign, makeITfair lobbies among big brand companies through meetings, round tables, policy statements and issues papers commenting on their current activities. On the other hand, use is made of support of international trade unions federations and local trade unions, consumers organizations or civil society organizations in many countries. More info on makeITfair you can find here: http://makeitfair.org/

Over the 3 days of round table we became familiar with the issues within the electronic industry, especially mobile phone manufacturing, and worked together on finding specific solutions to ensure the sustainability of IT.

The round table discussions focused on the economic, social and environmental problems of the electronics supply chain. Further plans of collaboration between makeITfair and the youth organizations were discussed.

We were also given the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the industry, workers organizations from the South as well as with lobby organizations.

We were thirty youth representatives from organizations all around Europe, from countries like Germany, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Latvia, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden, UK, Poland.

Despite the somewhat limited time dedicated to networking (since the round table discussions were really intense) I managed to spend a lot of time promoting AEGEE and SuFu and I established contacts which I am sure could bevaluable for our next events. I was really happy to meet among the participants people who were already familiar with AEGEE,and who were even members of AEGEE too.

Already some people have expressed interest to promote AEGEE and cooperate with us in future events! Not so bad for such a short time alotted to knowing the fellow associations, really!

You can find some nice videos taken during the event here and here

Enjoy!

Great week with SuFu in Copenhagen

Today morning was the last time, when participants of "Sustainable SCANdinavia" gathered together in the hostel common room in Copenhagen, to look back to this great week and see what they had learned.
It both seems like ages ago and like yesterday at the same time, when participants were welcomed in the hostel, where they also got their own personal mug, that was used during the whole week (no plastic cups were used during this event).

It was nice to see people using their SuFu mugs everywhere. Hopefully they will be also used in future events :P

Copenhagen has many sustainability practices to show: everyone knows about the big amount of bicycles in the city, in fact the city hall representative, who gave us open speech for the whole week, also arrived on a bike. Alternative community Christiania represents it's own version of sustainability, where we had guided tour.

Another aspect came with the visit to waste management center: Danes seem to have recycling in their blood and public recycling centers are used often.
It is also no problem to find organic food in Denmark, even visiting a most common supermarket, the organisers could find enough products to make almost totally organic dinner for all the participants. On the last evening we even got the chance to dine in a 100% organic restaurant, where everything from the clothes of the cooks to the drinks in the bar was organic. Plus the meals, that were made right in front of the customers in the open kitchen.

It was great to spend this week with so nice participants, who really made the event come alive. Besides the crazy parties, participants still managed to wake up every morning on time (big thanks to our wake up responsible Miguel!) and stayed energetic during all the days (thanks to Percin for all the energizers!). Also weather seemed to like us, as on the last days some people even managed to get small sunburn.


The concrete results of the "Sustainable SCANdinavia" are probably still to come. Many nice ideas were created for next possible events, and if we are lucky, we might even have 2nd Scandinavian sustainability lesson still this year in Sweden.

Finally I would like to thank Karmen from Ljubljana, who was one of our trainers and AEGEE-Copenhagen guys, for arranging us probably the most delicious dinners in the history of AEGEE events and showing us the Copenhagen nightlife! My last thanks go to Katrin and Dragana, who were the managers for this project and worked on it for many months. Well done, girls!