A few weeks ago AEGEE-Barcelona organised the second edition of the Regional Training Course (RTC), this time named “Get to know AEGEE”, in collaboration with AEGEE-Tarragona and AEGEE-Castelló. The first edition was in Tarragona one year ago and it was a success, so AEGEE-Barcelona members wanted to repeat the same structure of the event, hoping next year AEGEE-Castelló will continue with the tradition. They prepared one day full of workshops, and celebrated the Carnival weekend on Friday and Saturday night, with a pub crawl and emoji party. To end the weekend, they prepared a bike city tour of the most beautiful places of Barcelona.
The Catalan Antenna also organised another Local Training Course (LTC) last year that was made, like the previous ones, to present AEGEE to the new members after the Summer University campaign, and to encourage them to be active in the antenna. The local antenna, in fact, urgently needs a new generation, considering the members of the Board have finished their studies at university. The current Board has only a new member, Irene Garcia (Local Events Responsible), who is in charge of the local activities. The other four Board members, Claudia Nogués (President), Alba Morera (Secretary), Isma Saura (Treasurer), Elsa Martin (Advisory Board) and Katy, have been in the Board for two or more years. About the search for new members, on the 8th of February, AEGEE-Barcelona members organised a promotion activity in one of the three universities where they are represented, so they hope to get new people with this action. But the most effective promotion campaign is sticking posters through universities and promotion on Facebook.
The antenna in the capital of Catalonia usually tries to organise a local activity every month in order to be active and motivate the members. For group barcelonaexample, in December they went ice-skating as well as organised the traditional Christmas dinner. This January they did several weekly meetings together with a pub crawl or went to a celebration of the local festivity.
AEGEE-Barcelona changed the logo according to Visual Identity and now it represents the skyline of the city with big buildings or monuments. From left to right, you can see Hotel Wela, Mapfre’s Tower, Hotel Arts, Agbar’s Tower, Arc de Triomf, the cable car, Colón’s Tower, Montjuïc Communications Tower, National’s Museum Art of Catalonia (MNAC), Sagrada Família, Collserola’s Tower and the temple in Tibidabo.
Katy focuses on the last SU. “BarceYOLOna: the catalan adventure” was the first SU organised alone by the Spanish antenna after four years organising a Travel Summer University with different antennas. They were excited to see if they would be able to rock during 12 days and they did it. They are very proud of the participants, barcelona logolots of them were new members and got the AEGEE spirit very soon. They are happy to see that after their SU, they have become more active in AEGEE. Their SU was focused on practising sport while traveling and discovering Barcelona and Catalonia. This year they are organising the second edition of the SU, this time to promote sport and a healthy lifestyle in collaboration with the Health 4 Youth Interest Group. The programme is more or less the same and they are already super motivated with the preparation.
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bout the future plans, after their successful RTC, they will focus on the promotion of AEGEE and the Summer Universities of 2016. Their plan is to get as many active members as possible to let the new generations of AEGEE-Barcelona members carry with the antenna from October on (when the elections take place). To do that, they will organise a LTC for new members after the SU campaign.
Besides that, they will be organising their awesome Barceyolona Vol. II and, in the meantime, they will do an exchange in April, visiting AEGEE-Thessaloniki and AEGEE-Skopje. Also, there’s a possible exchange with AEGEE-Hamburg. But it’s not all, the antenna is willing to organise a Network Meeting.
Written by Matteo Lai, AEGEE-Cagliari.