A new meeting and a new vision for Yes To Sustainability
From the 4th to the 8th of October, a team of youth workers from Italy, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, Netherlands and Spain met in the ecovillage Sieben Linden in Germany for the third Transnational Project Meeting of the Erasmus+ project Yes To Sustainability Partnership, coordinated by GEN Europe.
Even though all the team was willing to start hands-on work, the working groups dedicated enough time and space to focus on their goals and their future steps, to gain more structure to be able to start working on concrete tasks once back home. Other sessions allowed participants to have a midterm overview and evaluation of the project, to consider future steps regarding the network and to start envisioning what will happen after the project is finished in order to give it continuity and increase its impact. There were very intense sessions with an amazing collective intelligence thriving which brought creativity, alignment of ideas and motivation, and adaptation to the needs and wishes of the group which strengthened our connection. Also, three new young members joined the team, with high energies and enthusiasm and those who couldn’t be present in the meeting joined us online in the blended session.
“We gathered with the clear intention of co-creating the meeting together to find what were our needs and our wishes to continue onwards with the project. We firstly organized ourselves to have a productive, enriching and pleasant meeting, from assembling a complete and intense schedule to dividing the facilitation of every session between all the members to empower ourselves and divide responsibilities”, says Nevena Savic from Zeleno Doba, “But we allowed ourselves some time to appreciate, laugh, move, and connect on a more personal level. We played volleyball, enjoyed the sauna, had a movie night, and celebrated our last night with conscious touch, deep sharings and nature documentaries”.
Among many other things, this meeting allowed the project team of Yes To Sustainability to redesign and update its vision, mission and goals: “After many conversations, dynamics, going-and-coming-back, we co-wrote the new vision, mission, and goals of our network. It has given us a foundation with a new impulse and a deeper understanding of the network to go on further with the future projects involving more young people with a desire for a regenerative culture”, shared Mónica from Red Iberica de Ecoaldeas, one of the partner organizations.
Photos by John Ozguc @aquinoxmedia, Ciska Van Stuijvenberg, Katarina Knezevic-Nikolic.