The Summer Academy 2019 took off. Every day we have a blog message of a participant of another organisation. Today Femke and Kaat shared their story of the day.
We started the day off with a true Summer Academy classic: the ‘From Paris to Berlin’ energiser. While the tunes and lyrics of the song filled our hostel’s garden, we danced without a care in the world. Young people from so many different countries doing a crazy dance together, that can only give you more energy!
After that, we started working in our small groups again and got to know SAME’s Quality Guidelines – this document outlines the standard levels of quality that every Action Day organisation aims to reach. We discussed what our organisations are good at and in which topics there is still room for improvement. We also took the time to think about what we, personally, find most important in an Action Day organisation. While working in this workshop, we came to the following conclusion: we’re all active in different organisations, come from different contexts, and have different opinions, but we have one common goal: to unite young people and create positive change together.
While working in this workshop, we came to the following conclusion: we’re all active in different organisations, come from different contexts, and have different opinions, but we have one common goal: to unite young people and create positive change together.
In the afternoon, external people and organisations came in to give us workshops. We’d had a chance to choose these group sessions earlier on, and we picked a workshop about facilitating. We started the workshop off with a sort of Scrabble and we brainstormed about what facilitating means to us. This was the start of a productive afternoon; we quickly got into the roles of facilitators and participants ourselves. After many tips and tricks, we ended the session with feedback. Both us and the workshop leader were pleasantly surprised with how the afternoon turned out; eagerness to learn, flowing conversations and a cheerful atmosphere made for an enjoyable end to the workshop. We ended the night engaging in nice conversations and building deeper, more meaningful connections with new friends. Basically, a successful second day at the Summer Academy.
29th July 2019 - Kaat Van Overtveldt and Femke Dreezen
