04/06/2023
Switzerland
participants
Since last year there has been an urgent need in ESN Switzerland to emphasize the topic of active listening, discrimination, racism, and sexism. Recent happenings made us, at National Level, and also some of our volunteers at the local level, make some unfortunate decisions, therefore it was fundamental to raise awareness about these topics, so as to give more reflection points to our sections for activities they organise for their exchange students.
Indeed, some sections have had to tackle situations of discrimination, which very often requires resources and a better understanding of the discrimination concept. Among these topics we also wanted our volunteers to better understand our Code of Conduct (CoC) and what are the specific actions to take if something might occur. We wanted them to recognize critical situations, offering them tools to speak up and act. We also launched before every NA and during our section visits different needs assessment forms to understand how to best help our local volunteers, and these topics were among the most requested.
That is why we wanted to have a conference and workshops on this year’s Work Plan theme. Our NAs are the best moment to reach all of our sections as there is a high participation compared to other events we do during the year. In addition, delivering the workshop during the NA allows our volunteers to learn about the topic and bring the knowledge back to their sections and even deliver workshops to their volunteers and exchange students.
The activities carried out during our NA were organized by our Training & Development (T&D) Officer with two sessions of three workshops in parallel, where each of them was focused on different aspects of this year's Work Plan. It included two of our volunteers who just participated in this year's Eduk8 Starter and two extra volunteers coming also from Eduk8 as well as the Italian pool of trainers. Each WS was 90 min long and was prepared by the above-mentioned facilitators. All WS was feedbacked by the T&D Officer, which is also a member of the Eduk8 Feedback Pool. Each participant chose one WS per session so in total they were able to attend two WS each. The 6 different topics were: Inclusive communication, Active Listening, Stereotypes, Youth Work Cooperation, Intersectionality, and Hate/Freedom of speech.
We included an introductory conference/panel discussion where we had several speakers sharing their stories and knowledge on the different topics. There was an opening and welcome speech by Maurizia Ruinelli, a representative of the USI university, that was hosting us for the event, followed by personal experiences shared by members of our network. Three other interventions were given by our international guests describing their work towards the LGBTQI+ community as well as towards social inclusion topics. These interventions also displayed the current situation in terms of LGBTQI+ rights in their respective countries.
Everything that was part of this event was mostly directed towards our local ESN volunteers, and had few local and international students participating. We promoted the conference within Lugano's universities through our social media and university internal emails. The WS sessions, due to the ESN CH National Assembly (NA) context, were only opened to our network volunteers. In general, since our volunteers normally organize different events within the year for local and international students, we expect this session to have a great impact on how our section works and a direct effect on our universities due to the multiplier effect.
This activity is part of the project:
Developing Youth Voices