While everybody is preparing for Agora Zaragoza, there is another important meeting taking place directly after the big statutory event, namely the European Level Meeting. It took place for the first time one year ago after Agora Budapest, and The AEGEEan used the opportunity to interview Beata Matuszka from the Comité Directeur (CD) about the idea as she was the one who developed it.
When did you get the idea of a European Level Meeting?
Beata: The idea came to me when I was still a Network Commissioner. As a NetCommie, you need to have a complete and perfect overview of the whole European level, you need to know the responsibilities and activities of each and every body, since whenever your locals need support, you are the one who can advise them or redirect them to the relevant body. It is best if you know the people on the European Level, since it is much easier to get in contact with them, ask for help for your locals, and basically this is where the idea was born: I wanted to provide a platform for networking and to facilitate the future communication of the AEGEE members.
What differences were there in the meeting that took place in Budapest from the one in Mannheim?
Budapest was the kick-off, the trial version of the event and (maybe not so much surprisingly) it was a success, quite a lot of people came, several ideas were born and the people could get to know each other. Beside networking, we have other important aims as well for these European level meetings, such as best practice sharing, working on initiatives together in order to develop our Network.
In Budapest it has been called the Committees’ and Commissions’ meeting because we were thinking to start first with the bodies which are responsible for rather the administrative part of the Network management. In Mannheim the scope became broader and the European level meeting has reached its final form, involving all the Working Groups, Projects, Committees and Commissions. Even if we had fewer amount of participants after Mannheim, the diversity helped us to reach even better results than in Budapest.
How will the one in Zaragoza be different from the two others?
After these events, the one in Zaragoza is very much anticipated. In terms of logistics, I got a great support from the local organisers to organise the one in Budapest and also Mannheim, it’s not different in Zaragoza either. After the open call, we got quite some applications and I’m really glad to see that so many people are interested in strengthening the cooperation and working together to make the European level and AEGEE better! The programme will be drafted with the help of the participants, the topics which are important to be discussed according to them have been already collected and Fabian Brüggemann, who was moderating the discussion in Mannheim, has also been giving us great support in developing the programme to get the best result out of these two days.
Diana Tupchiienko, president of the Juridical Commission also agrees that the European Level meeting is important. “It is time to put aside all misunderstandings and deliberate on the ways how to improve the work of AEGEE as one, undividable mechanism. During these kind of meetings you can get to know people who are or may turn out to be the future of our Association, understand others, share their opinions and share wise advices. And it’s great to have a new idea after a rich-flavoured cup of latte and have a plan how to put it into practice after a slice of a cheesecake. It’s definitely a great opportunity to learn!”
Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-København