Flagship Projects in Nightmare Before Christmas

Writing again from Madrid, same location where we had our workshops during SuFu and the City. So nice good memories... AEGEE-Madrid has organized its LTC, a tradition for december in this South West corner of Europe: Nightmare Before Christmas is the name, and it celebrates now its third edition.

This year the aim is to present a very important set of information to new members of antennae South of the Pyrinees: the importance of Flagship Projects in AEGEE, and especially to show our antennae what can they do in this framework. It has been conceived by a great team of trainers, coming from several antennae under the supervision of the NetCommie Oscar.

We have started early this orning (yeah!) with basic presentations on AEGEE structure and history, to warm up; soon we came into a review of past Flagship Projects, with their objectives and the tools (events) they created to achieve them. Of course we gave special attention to our dear SuFu project, which was presented in detail, event by event, before giving entry to people from Beyond Europe.

Let's hope that, after their case work during the rest of the LTC, an antenna will come up with the motivation, ideas and will to organize another Flagship Project event down here... SuFu and the City was a great success, let's try to repeat it soon!

Alicante awaits us...

Here in Morocco is sooo cold, I want to arrive home in Alicante next week (after a stop in LTC Madrid - Nightmare before Christmas III) and start preparing our traditional NY meeting. This time I will be the host, and it is a pleasure and honour after having been so well treated in Estonia and Greece.

I am really looking forward to meet again all those friends, some of them will be together for 4th year in a row, what a record! For some others will be the first, a nice comeback after a year of absence, and unfortunately some people won't be able to join us this year :( We will have you present in our hearts, that is for sure, because we are the Panda team!

Kadri is working on the program, because we will be there for work; but I will try to prepare the social agenda, with NY party, and hopefully we can squeeze there some outdoor activity as usual (what about climbing the mountain in the picture?). Yes! the sea is there so we will be able to swim again like past year. For those of you who are cold-blooded, there will be also sauna :)

Countdown already started, there are just 12 days till first of you come to Alicante...

SuFuing in the city

4 SuFu Team members...
1 whole antenna working 24h...
A great team of participants...
The support of the Youth in Action program from the European Commission...
A big city to discover from a different point of view...


These are the ingredients for SuFu and the city, a seminar that at this very same moment is having place in Madrid. As we are more or less passing the equator of the week, we can say that it is doing very well. We spent the morning at the waste recycling plant of Valdemingomez; providing service for the whole city (4.5 million people), it is a small city on itself where all the packages and organic waste is prepared for being recycled. On previous days, IUCN speaker Russell Galt showed us the interactions between biodiversity and urban environment, and gave us the opportunity to provide ideas for the future evaluation system of urban biodiversity. We also could learn about citizen initiatives struggling with legislation to have the right to transform an empty space into a public open area for the neighbours, with vegetable garden, sport fields, and even an open air theater! And more and more activities that fill our mornings, afternoons and nights.

Here you can have some impressions from Filip, from AEGEE-Skopje, one of our participants:
"Great seminar, lots of interesting visits and speeches, and all of that in the wonderful city of Madrid. Love it !!". Anyway we will not stop working hard to make the second half even better, we are motivated to close the SuFu cycle with another successful project accomplished!

Now we have to leave you, here it is hard to find some free time :) Participants are now doing a Architecture Photo Rally...

Slow summer time does not stop SuFu team

Hello All!!

I am here in my Moroccan Mountains, tired after a full day driving my 4x4 trying to get some new information about my leopards... and in the evening, trying to revive this blog that has fallen under the lazyness of the summer.

But the lack of news here doesn't mean that we have not been busy! At the moment, the event Danube: Source of Inspiration will be closing in the amazing environment of Danube Delta. I am sure soon our Danube Girls will update you on what happened. And soon, second part of Danube Project will happen in Bratislava - Danube: Most International River in the World (Sept 7-13th).

I am busy with the details of another event, one that is my personal initiative, but only possible with the enthusiastic collaboration of my friends from AEGEE-Madrid: SuFu and the City, from Oct 31st to Nov 8th. More than a week to explore the role of cities in shaping a more sustainable world. 7 days full of workshops and debates, with plenty of visits and conferences, where I hope we can gather 25 young citizens from all over Europe who want to exchange ideas and discover the pros and cons of cities, the incredible power of active citizens in shaping the evolution of their cities, the trends in urban design and architecture, the secrets of urban environments. And during the nights, we will explore "the city that never sleeps"!

We have chosen Madrid because it is a city that has changed a lot in the past years, and more to come with the candidature to host the Olympic Games in 2016. A city with a great park in its heart (Retiro), with one of the best Underground systems, with an active citizneship and gaining multucultural richness year by year, and lots of neighbourhoods with its own personalities. A city to discover in many layers, like a Matrioshka, is waiting for you!

If you want to learn and participate in the discussions, if you have ideas that want to share, then you are lucky!!! You can still apply till Aug 25th! It is an event funded with Youth in Action program, so you may even get flight reimboursement :) You can get more information at the intranet, in facebook, or you can ask directly leaving a comment at this post.

Due to the transition between new and old websites in AEGEE, the best way to apply is to send an email directly to AEGEE Madrid (aegeemadrid (at) gmail.com), including:

If you experience any problem with you application in the website, please send us an email to aegeemadrid@gmail.com including the following information:

Full name:

Aegee antennae:

Studies:

Date fo birth:

Sex:

Address:

Phone:

Email:

Visum required:
Passport no:
Nationality:
Place of birth:

Remarks:

Q1 Why do you want to attend this event?:
Q2 What do you know about sustainable development and urban environments?:

Q3 Tell us something about yourself:

And now I say good bye, but before leaving I inform you that tomorrow is the first day of Ramadan in Morocco... Wish me luck!

SuFu meeting in Brussels

SuFu is having a midyear meeting in Brussels at the moment.
We took this opportunity to evaluate our progress so far, plan for our upcoming events (they're going to be utterly cool, so stay tuned!!) and last but not least enjoy and improve our team spirit and try the combination of Dutch asparagus and Belgian peas in a risotto. And as it was the EU's Green Week in Brussels, we also visited there.

Because someone tried to poison our highly successful SuFu project manager, SuFu panda had to come to save the day. Naturally, we used this opportunity to make a video about all the adventures this brave panda had in AEGEE's headquarters. Of course we will share this with you soon :-)

At the meeting we had a lot of creative sessions, defined the work to be done in the future and planned how we would do the dissemination of all our results.
Because the network commission was present at the CD house too, we did a European Night together, which started with a bit late, but utterly marvelous pizza dinner made by Olya and Thomas. After that we did the presentations about each other's cultures and tasted from the nice food and beverages coming from all the different countries. The Estonians (Tiit in particular) really put their effort in it with building a genuine Estonian Sauna in a tent in the garden. Of course it took some Dutch ingeniuty to realise this Estonian project, but the end result was marvelous. And so SuFu kept it's tradition to introduce the merits of Estonian sauna to yet another member of the Comité Directeur (and all other people present).

Stay tuned for more information about our upcoming events, there are a lot of nice things coming up: Activities in the Danube project in the Danube Delta (Romania) and Bratislava (Slovakia), SuFu in the city in Madrid (Spain).

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!

SuFu Panda getting ready for EBM

As all AEGEE members know, next weekend will be our European Boards Meeting in Torino. And yes, SuFu Panda will be also there :)
So, those of you going there, you will be lucky first ones to see our mascotte Panda in public.
Of course, in EBM you will also have the chance to get to know more about our upcoming activities, of which to think tank and Scandinavia visit we have already open applications (go check: http://www.aegee.org/events).
You can meet SuFu team in Roundtable Discussions, in AEGEE cafe and also in workshop, that we will share with one of our partners. So will get the chance to hear also, why and how people are dealing with sustainability outside AEGEE.
And of course, we will have some surprises ;)

Hope to meet and talk to many of you in Torino next week!