Spring Agora Ljubljana 2008: New Activities from Training Sessions to Progress Meetings, by Maria Morozova

There were two new activities on the agenda of the Spring Agora Ljubljana 2008 in addition to the plenary, workshops and prytania sessions. These were training sessions and progress meetings. In order to get a personal insight in what was happening during training sessions as well as the new introduced progress meetings I made an interview with Tika Tsertsvadze, Vice President of AEGEE-Europe 2007-2008 who lead some of these new activities.

Maria (M): What is the main idea behind these training sessions?
Tika(T): The idea is to have an external for the AEGEE members. Although the idea did not work for this Agora, we hope that at the next Agora it will work. For the training session we invited companies for the members of AEGEE to meet them directly and the companies to advertise themselves and to open up us.

M: How do you evaluate the trainings, namely your training “Youth in Action”?
(T): My training was quite ok… I cannot evaluate my training (smiles). At the end of the workshop we had a case work and all the proposals were good, so I proposed them to develop it into the real project and to submit it within one week to me, so that we can introduce at the end of debate at least 2 or 3 of the proposals to the project.

M: Next to the training session, there were also progress meetings. Can you give us your impression from the part you let?
(T): Except for the trainings there are also progress meetings. I was at one of the progress meetings on the strategic planning, because we are preparing it. The aim of the progress meeting was to involve and to start consultation now. I had one group and it was quite productive to receive the feedback from them how it was done for EBM in Delft. I give this feedback to some people to develop it now. The feedback was critical but constructive, so that is something to be taken into consideration.

M: Is it possible to make trainings during the next Agora?
(T): We hope for the next Agora to get guests like companies, commissions and the institutions and I think we will continue to do so, because it is good for our members to meet those ‘high level’ people personally and to discuss with them personally. The companies liked the idea and they think they will come. Another reason we had this is that if the Microsoft or any other company would come we will finally manage to make FR, because they will promote themselves here among 1000 people.

Maria Morozova
AEGEE-Kyiv