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!

Think Tank - small update

And we owe you a post about how the Think Tank went. I can be short about it: The think tank was great! Around 50 participants from 11 countries took part: The Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, Turkey, Greece, Rumania, Germany and Russia. The first day we visited the European Renewable Energy House, where we had a great tour along all energy saving measures, a lobby tour through Brussels by Corporate Europe and workshops in the CD house. The second day we had the Think Tank itself: 6 hours to define an answer to a question by one of our partners. And the last day we went to discover Brussels.

Our participants were very nice! Besides being eager for information and working hard to finish the answer paper in time, as organisers we als had great fun with Greek participants feeding us chocolate, Serbians bringing their rakia in the evening, Diego helping out where-ever he could, and some knew the center of Brussels even better than the organisers. There is no space to mention all. For the organisers it was just great to see this enthousiasm, it was the best reward for the efforts they had taken to organise.

And the content was great! All groups made their best of the questions asked to them, and the jury had the difficult task to pick the best from them. The winner was Team Adioma, the group with members of AEGEE-Brussels and AEGEE-Leuven. Congratulations to Ioana, Marieke, Mathias and Adeline, they proved not to let the heavy international participant group scare them, and took a home victory. The second place was shared by two teams: M.T.E.D. (Mediterranean Team for Energy and Development - a team with Greek and Turkish members) and Can7ina (with participants from Germany and The Netherlands).
For more impressions of the day, you can find the press release here and pictures here.

As an event like this is never organised without help, I'd also like to take this opportunity for thanking everyone who helped making this event such a great success! Percin, Robin, Kadri and Ana for helping out in the whole organisation, it couldn't have been done without you! Romain for helping out in PR, Diego too for his great help in doing PR, and for meeting the incoming participants. A big thank you to TUSIAD for organising the reception for us and to our partners for providing the questions - it would not have been possible without this input and help. Andrey Shadurskiy for sharing his pictures with us (picture 2 and 4 in this blog are his). And all the lodgers, speakers, workshop leaders, etc. for their support. And last but not least: all participants. You were great!!

Warming up for Copenhagen

Part of SuFu-Team met in Copenhage for some days (19th to 23rd Feb), to make last preparations for the first chapter in the Sustainable SCANdinavia series... It was Dragana and Katrin as main coordinators of the event, and Percin and Miguel (writing this) for collaboration. And the people from AEGEE-Copenhagen too, of course. Some other members were busy organizing the THINK TANK in Brussels, or participating at the Y-Vote event in München.

We fell in love with the city when we walked around visiting different locations that participants will enjoy; we discussed the programme and made some rearrangements; we had a look at some of the applications and got enthusiastic about the high level of them. We also made last agreements for the venue where the conferences will take place, and found a possible place for the opening; lastly we talked with people at the hostel. We (of course!) also took the pulse of Copenhagen nights, finding one or two places that we are sure our happy participants will love!

On personal level, it was my second time in the city and it snowed everyday, as the first time did. No matter what members of AEGEE-København tell about not snowing often in their city, if you are coming I advise you take warm clothes and good shoes! :)


PS: Pictures of people working are usually boring, so this time we show you some more interesting ones :)

The (biggest) environmental problem in Europe?

This was the question asked to AEGEE members in autumn 2008, during a survey about the ecological awareness of young Europeans. Now the time has come to start analysing the responses. And here I would like to list the problems that AEGEE'ans consider the most important ones in Europe nowadays.
Out of 145 respondents, there were over 40 different problems mentioned. That shows that indeed we have a lot of things to take care of. Compiling them into topics, here you can see the Top 10:

1) air pollution and greenhouse gases
2) unsustainable production and use of energy, fossil fuels
3) water problems (pollution, shortage of drinking water)
4) unsustainable transport, too many cars
5) waste problems and lack of recycling
6) over consumption and production, using too much resources
7) global warming and climate change
8) pollution generally
9) deforestration, unsustainable use of forests
10) lack of political will and international cooperation to make changes

Other problems mentioned were: nuclear pollution, people's awareness and attitude, problems connected to industries, agricultural production, consuming too much meat and fish, increasing poverty, pollution from cities, etc.

There was no big domination of one opinion (the no 1 problem was mentioned by around 12% of respondents), but it can be seen that many of the listed problems are more or less connected to climate change. This reminds me the poll made by EU in September 2008 showing also that Europeans worry a lot about climate change, BUT most of them are not willing to do much about it. What about us, the youth, AEGEE?

About the survey: The whole survey consisted of questions generally about sustainable development and about consumption patterns. It will be basis for a Master thesis and the overall final results will be published in summer 2009.