European Youth Forum’s Member Organisations, which AEGEE-Europe is a part of, gathers twice a year for statutory meetings. Once in every two years a General Assembly is organised, while all the remaining meetings are called Council of Members (or in short COMEM). The last one took place in November 2011 in Braga, Portugal, the European Youth Capital 2011. AEGEE couldn’t miss it so the Liaison Officer towards YFJ together with the President of AEGEE-Europe went there to present the position of our association and make sure that everything works in order.
During the meeting a set of various happenings took place. The most significant for the entire network of YFJ was definitely work on policies and policy statements that would represent a joint position of the Youth Forum towards external partners. From AEGEE’s perspective, two or three of them were especially important. Representatives of the member Organisations decided on three significant policy documents.
The first one is a reaction to the proposed changes in Youth in Action. According to the newest proposal of the European Commission in the upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework, the programme would be merged with, among others, Erasmus Programme and create a single big programme for mobility, education and youth. In a process of broad consultations and following the previous position paper of YFJ on the future of Youth in Action we disagreed with the idea of such a merger. A new strong position representing our negative opinion was released. The process of developing a new youth programme and all the relevant documents of the Youth Forum can be found at http://www.whereareyouthgoing.eu/ , where you can also support the work of YFJ and express your opinion on the youth programme.
Further on, an extensive discussion was concluded with a new position paper of YFJ on key demands preventing young people from becoming the main victims of the crisis. Thirdly, the Youth started preparations for the upcoming Rio+20 conference, about which you might have heard recently from Mathieu (Environmental Working Group) and Andrea (Liaison Officer towards the United Nations). In that document an opinion on which direction would be the most desired for young people from Europe was expressed. The original of these documents can be found in the Youth Policy Watch section on the website of YFJ.
No less important was the decision by COMEM on supporting and approving the decision of the Board of YFJ to appoint Giuseppe Porcaro for the second mandate as the Secretary General of YFJ. This means that his term will expire in two years and until then he will run the office in Brussels. A very important point of the agenda was the election of the new Advisory Council which will work with the European Youth Foundation and distribute grants from them. The Council is composed of representatives of International Nongovernmental Youth Organisations and National Youth Councils elected from among Member Organisations of YFJ and other organisations.
All in all, Braga’s COMEM was quite intensive and full of work but certainly allowed YFJ to clarify its position on some hot and recently very urging topics. The next COMEM will take place in Spring in Belgium, most probably in Brussels.
In case you would like to know more about what is going on in YFJ, I strongly encourage you to visit the website http://youthforum.org/ and subscribe to our mailing list YOUTHFORUM-NEWS-L where more information will be posted.
Written by Miroslaw Krzanik, Liasion Officer of YFJ