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!

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!!

Thursday, Friday & Saturday: Think Tank!

Hi SuFu bloggies,

This Thursday, Friday and Saturday our think tank: "Create and In(ter)novate!" is going to take place in Brussels. As it is quite a busy period, this will be a short blog. But I will try to make it up to you by promissing to publish a long post about it afterwards (And some of you I might see there).

These days the last things are coming together: confirmations from speakers, jury members, trying to get some last discounts for the participants, arranging all the lodging, etc. But it is going to be nice, because at the end of the week the result will be:
The first ever pan-European youth Think Tank on mobility and energy.
It is going to be the first time to gather many young Europeans in this format, to really make and propose fresh and innovative solutions to existing problems in companies and organisations. Participants will meet other young students and young professionals from all over Europe, and can even earn 1000 Euro with using their creativity in a useful way. And to top it all off the think tank will be closed with a very nice and luxury reception in Brussels at TUSIAD, the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association, who are so kind to host this for us.
If you are interested: there are still some places left for those who wish to participate!

For more information you can check our website.
And to apply click here
Participation is open to all European students and young professionals.

Hope to see you around at one of our activities!! (and why not this Think Tank ;-)

Martien

Team Update March

Hello SuFu friends!!

This week I will write a team update, so you can have a general idea of what the SuFu team is dealing with at this moment. Most of us have exams at the moment, but that is not stopping SuFu!!

But before, I want to introduce you Milana, our new PR manager; she is from AEGEE-Ljublana, and joined our team with high motivation, bringing us more creativity and new inspiration. you can find a hint on her work at the SuFu newsletter of February.

Our manager, Kadri, keeps her busy coordinating the team, but had time to attend the Y-vote event in München to present SuFu there, together with Maria; they gave a workshop about Renewable Energies. Martien and Ana (Percin supporting them) work hard nowadays to make the Think Tank a event where creativity and ideas flourish. Katrin is in charge of the Sustainable SCANdinavia event in Copenhagen, while Dragana roams in Cambodian wilderness on a trip with her Faculty...

Tiit is getting ready to gather a group of experienced members to develop the concept of Sustainability Trainings. There will be a meeting soon, just stay tuned if you think you can contribute.

Georgios is waiting for these two events to be accomplished to start gathering results and evaluation. Olga is quite busy at her studies too, but she started gathering antennae that want to organize an event for the European Day of Environment. Will you be one of them? :)

Our Danube girls, Iulia and Flavia, mix exams with project coordination in perfect harmony, and we wish them good luck at both!

Miguel is still in his Moroccan mountains, trying to hunt leopards (with a camera), and working together with AEGEE-Madrid to prepare the application for the SuFu and the City event; this weekend Miguel will try to meet with Maria in Fez; after München, she is taking a break at her FR activities to do a work visit to Morocco. Let's see if communications and bad weather allow this meeting :)

As you see, busy time for the SuFu's... But we love it!

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 :)