This year the European Youth Forum (YFJ) Academy took place 17-21 June in Vilnius, Lithuania. EFIL has 2 representatives: Viviana Galli (AFS Belgium French) who is a member of EFIL’s and the YFJ Pool of Trainers and Alexandra Singpiel, who – as a member of EFIL’s EPOR – is the representative of EFIL to the YFJ.
Viviana attended the meeting of the Pool of Trainers, aimed at developing new training resources, while Alexandra attended the training on “Advocacy from a Youth Work Perspective”, focusing on ensuring quality in advocacy processes and setting up effective communications strategies when advocating.
The three-day Advocacy training was attended by approx. 25 other participants from the member organisations of the YFJ from both National Youth Councils as well as international youth NGOs.
On the first day and half a very theoretical approach was followed, by defining advocacy and discussing how it can be used in different environments. Topics included the policy cycle, identifying different stakeholders who need to be involved in the different stages of the process and a theoretical idea of strategy planning. Additionally members of the YFJ Secretariat joined the training explaining their approach to advocacy and how they ensure being representative through consultations with member organisations on different topics. They presented three of their campaigns and how they approached the topics, namely the League of Young Voters, the Internship-Charta and Erasmus+.
Then followed the transfer of the theory into action and developing a campaign, whereby the participants worked on topics some of the MOs had in common, being Recognition of Non Formal Education; Youth Employment; Youth Policy on national level and Human Rights/Women Rights.
In addition the National Youth Council of Lithuania set up a great evening program to get to know the city.
For more: elisa.briga@afs.org