1/2009

News from IYNF

Secretariat and Volunteers

Four years of Meet the Freak Book

Having organised four editions of international youth exchanges on amateur art called Meet the Freak and being busy with preparation of the fifth one was an excellent opportunity to prepare a summarising booklet and DVD from all the previous years. On about 80 pages we look back to Beroun (twice), Bremen and Costa da Caparica and with memories of participants and volunteers follow the history of the successful project. Thanks to Council of Europe and European Union for provided funding to make the booklet and DVD possible.

Planning weekend 2008

The Planning weekend 2008 took place in a beautiful little town of Szekszard in Hungary. Almost thirty IYNF volunteers, staff members and locals met to evaluate and discuss the success of last years’ activities, to establish working teams for the upcoming projects and start planning it. One of the aims of the meeting was also to come to a clearer idea of redistributing roles in the organisation since the decrease of office members is planned. They also had an opportunity to celebrate the birthday of the IYNF Vice-President, to visit a local wine festival and to see the venue of the next year’s Meet the Freak. The meeting was very nice and successful in many ways.

International Friends of Nature Congress: new President and Climate Charter

After twenty years of service for IFN, the former President Herbert Brückner (D) stepped out from the leadership with standing ovation at the Congress of IFN in Liberec at the end of September. The newly elected President Manfred Pils (A) is a known face in IFN, too. For ten years the Secretary General of IFN and since 2005 a full member of its Board, he stood up for the election with the vision of connecting and finding synergies of local, national and international levels of the movement. Read more about Manfred in the interview.
The other major point of the Congress was a debate and later adoption of the Climate Charter of IFN which points both to the European policy makers as well as internally to the movement by setting ambitious aims for Naturefriends’ contribution to climate protection.

New faces in IYNF Secretariat

After the announced leave of almost complete staff of the Secretariat, there are new faces in the office now. Ivan Blazek (24) from Slovakia took a position of Finance and Office Coordinator and successfully gets into the piles of numbers, figures, applications, reports, statements and regulations to keep order in them. Martijn van den Berg (26) from the Netherlands is a new EVS volunteer in the Secretariat. His service in IYNF will go until mid-September 2009. Martijn cares for our current and new communication tools to facilitate contacts with all our target groups.
As you can see, from female-dominated teams IYNF have had for the last ten years, all in a sudden there is a male-only team in the office. Despite our efforts to break gender stereotypes occasional female visitors report higher mess rate than in the past.

Communication tools

IYNF is doing its upmost best to have a good communication with its member organisations, volunteers and other people who are interested. Therefore we are working hard to keep our existing communication tools updated but also to create new ones. A while ago we launched our new forum which you can find at: forum.iynf.org. Please register if you are interested. For our volunteers we have our database with a lot of information about organisations and (former) participants. The database turned out to be a great tool for both staff and volunteers in the communication and promotion of our projects. New is IYNF Wiki, there is a lot of information written about procedures, phases and roles in projects, publications and the history of the organisation. There’s also a group of IYNF volunteers on Facebook (www.facebook.com). Of course we still have Courier, our weekly digital newsletter and Variety, which you are reading now. We are developing two other newsletters at the moment. One for our volunteers, this will be a paper newsletter with 4 issues a year. The other one will be a monthly digital update to our member organisations only with specific information about our activities and offers. But of course there is also space to put offers from our member organisations there. As you can see, IYNF is on the move!

TouchDown

From 29th of October till the 2nd of November IYNF organised a networking seminar. The seminar was held in Naturfreundehaus Karl Renner in Berlin, Germany. The activity was attended by less people than we had planned and wished for, maybe also because of that it was evaluated by all participants and team members as very useful. The participants got to know each other very well and explored possibilities of further partnerships and projects. With focus on youth exchanges the team prepared a learning programme on the educational, intercultural and project management dimension of international activities.

Extraordinary General Assembly

At the excited General Assembly in May in Oostduinkerke where the Presidium presented a possible new structure of the organisation, it was decided that the debates will continue and will be closed by a common decision in winter 2008 at the Extraordinary General Assembly (EGA). This meeting took place 12–14 December in Olomouc, CZ. IYNF leadership and representatives of the member organisations met at a common meeting in October to prepare proposals for the EGA. These include new design of the Workplan, new way of organising statutory and working meetings and a framework agreement on the next period until regular GA in 2010. The EGA is expected to bring little or no structural changes to IYNF but changes in practice of the common work of IYNF and its member organisations.

Seminar X-perience and outdoor conference at Hruba Skala

The fourth edition of the Inter-national Mountain and Outdoor Sports Conference was organised at Hruba Skala. The project which started in 2004 in the framework of the European Year of Education through Sport initiative got its firm place in the European community of outdoor sports and outdoor education as a nice and intense gathering of academics and practitioners and occasionally also policy makers.
For the second time, the conference was organised in parallel with a youth seminar. This concurrence was repeatedly evaluated as a great synergy for both events. Almost fifty people altogether experienced in practice the mission of such meetings – connect and inspire.

Juicy interviews

Find out here, at the website version an additional juicy stuff for Variety.
Interviews with those who left IYNF headquarters in last months.
We are talking about Petra Steigerova, Sophie Matysek, Cili Lohasz, Simon Standaert and Rodrigo Texeira!!!

> interview by Joao Duarte<

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