Deciding hours

The next few hours will be deceisive for the ELAYS I guess... The email I am showing to you was written tonight. It is a symbol for our determination to make ELAYS happen...

"ELAYS is a great project, it is promising, high-flying and could be the start of a new era of cooperation between two continents... I mean if that is not something cool, I don't know what is.. And WE are doing this together! We have to focus on the simply stunning result we're going to achieve next year with the project. People will be inspired and changed. Paradigms will be modified and even personal revolutions will be initiated by ELAYS, I am sure!

Besides we gotta need funds for this project. Sad but true. Fact is, that we have already contacted the people that are going to sponsor us. That means we only need to send them the information and they will give us money, not with a probability of 100% of course, but we can assume that some will be sponsoring us.

The ELAYS team we have here is full of super motivated and skilled individuals (I read through the biographies and notices that everybody else speaks at least one language than me...). It feels good to have such labour-pool in our backs, there Alessia surely agrees with me. The team is ready work, that it proofed during the last weeks. They achieved a lot, even with short notice, without complaining (too much) :). I think, with them ELAYS is going to be the success we are all hoping for!

What we need now (before Christmas) are two things basically:

1. OFAS' support (some 40k CHF would look good in our budget)
2. Send out the Concept to our sponsors (about 40 institutions)

To achieve this pretty much everything is already done. I just received notice from Yoko that the french version of the concept still needs some work, but still the German version and especially the English version are practically ready to rumble.
Our potential in all different ways is HUGE, we only need to exploit it, focusing on the essential things.

Tomorrow I want to bring a fully completed dossier to the post office: addressing OFAS in Bern! We need to stick to this date (30th of November) as Jero reminded us in his email as well.

After tomorrow the concepts will have all our attention. We have the letters, we have the Short Description, we have the concept. What are we waiting for guys?? The only thing I know is that the potential sponsors are going to forget about ELAYS if we don't bring our PROJECT to their attention again soon. As soon as they receive our dossier, I am sure that they will be happy to help us, even with short time. People will want to be part of this. They will try everything in their might to make it happen.

The essence of my mail is that I am very grateful and happy to work with you all together and think that we can make this happen. There will be, for sure, some more stress and inconveniences coming up... BUT shall that be the "impossible to tackle" obstacle for us, for the ELAYS? With all my heart, NO! Please guys, let us work hand in hand to reach the best outcome for us, for the team, for the participants, for the implementation of the "social youth ventures" that only exist on paper yet...

Puh... that was some mail. Sorry that I stole you another 10 minutes to read all this, but it came from my heart. Please understand this mail as a motivation for the future and not as anything else!"

Have a truly good night,

Nathan

News :)

Hi everyone!! :)

After a very intense morning and part of the night working on the conceptof the ELAYS I decided to write to you about all the news :)

These last weeks we managed to

• finish all the different Short Descriptions of the project
• call different organisations/foundations/potential sponsors etc.etc. in order to gain support
• define our partnerships with Ashoka and Peacechild

These are some of the things we did ...impossible to write everything ;)

These days we are going to finish the whole dossier and translate it in different languages in order to send it out to the different organisations/foundations (etc.) we contacted.

We are really happy about our work, a lot of the people we contacted these days to gain support seem really interesetd to the ELAYS. Reason why we are looking forward to send them the dossier and receive their comments,feedbaks and of course obtain their collaboration.

The next days will be crucial for our project!!We ll be updating you as soon as we have important news.

Thanks a lot for your interest and thanks to our team!!Everyone is doing a great job!

Alessia (co-president ELAYS)

ps I hope that I ll have time the next few daysto present to you all the organising team.

Short description 2!!

Hi everyone!!
I just wanted to inform you that we had a lot of feedbacks on our 1st description and we managed to rephrase and correct it :)

Yesterday we sent it to Dennis and we hope that it will be ok and that he can send it to his colleagues as soon. He has already contacted some of them and they seem to be interested!!Great!!!:D

Next step : prepare a short description /letter for the sponsors till Friday morning!!
That s quite a big work to do but we are happy to do it ;)

Well I hope you're happy to see that the organisation process goes on ;)

I'll write to you as soon to tell you all the news about the newly formed team!!

Alessia ( co-president ELAYS)

Short description day 1!!!

Hi everybody :)

Today I met with Nathan to write the short description of the ELAYS that we have to send to Dennis so that he can send it afterwards to his collegues in Latin America..our network starts getting bigger !!;)

What came up after more or less 2 hours of working is probably the best short description we have ever done, finally our ides about the ELAYS came up clearly!

What we thought is the reason for that change is that right now we are really into the Elays... it is becoming part of our lives more than it was before , we never stop thinking about it and that makes us much more productive.

Well, that's what I felt I wanted to share with you all ;)

Thanks for reading our blog :)

Alessia (co-president elays)

Meeting 1 after the EYS '09

Excited, tired, amazed and totally convinced that we have to work hard and fast....

... to realize the ELAYS as we envisage it.

This is like we felt when we came together at noon today to have lunch together in Geneva. With we, we always mean the ELAYS team (the Organisational Committee). There were so many things to discuss. We should get a short description together to send it to Dennis, from Ashoka. We should discuss the inputs and comments etc. that we got from the participants at the EYS '09 working group from Sunday. We had to discuss the concept of the workshops. I could go on and on with the list. The result is a really big list of things that we need to do till next week. ONLY till next week.. What comes the weeks after that... wouldn't fit into this blog.

Well, so far so good.. or not?

You still don't know what I am talking about, do you?

In that case: for all that never heard of the ELAYS before, here, a short explanation:

-> First of all it is a vision.

A vision of a new style of cooperation between the youth of two continents: Latin America and Europe. ELAYS shall be the initialising event to hopefully engage both the Latin Americans and the Europeans together in the same projects (that will be chosen by a jury of experts prior to the event).

The goal mentioned above we want to realise through four days of:

• workshops
• panel discussion
• teambuilding events
• working groups
• social events
  
• and a lot discussing whenever there is time
• public evening (guest speakers, food, discussion)
  
• a business trip for the Latin Americans, in order to meet with NGOs and OIs in different Euopena cities and present them their project ideas

The details are yet to be fixed and we are looking forward to an intense and successful preparation period... and of course, we are happy to get critics, comments and thought that you might want to share with us!


There are other positive things to mention:

• the newly found Team-members. We have one from Romania, one from Switzerland, one from the UK, one from Bolivia and one from Colombia.
  
• Others will help as as far as they can, but can't take part in the team. Thank you all for that effort! We need you all!

• We will probably have a partnership with Ashoka fixed at the end of the week! Then we can go on and look for sponsors.
  
• Also the NGO Peace Child is willing to help us with the training of the facilitators of the workshops and the monitoring of the projects, once they're established.
  

I hope that with this post ELAYS has become a little bit clearer to you...

If it hasn't and ELAYS is as mysterious as ever, don't worry! It's a complex and big thing and unfortunately difficult to descripe in a few sentences.

We will definitely try to continue posting and inform you in the next weeks regularly.

All the best, Nathan (co-president ELAYS '10)

Our new blog!!!

Hello everyone!!

This is our new great blog!But....uhm...actually you don't know who we are and what the blog is about...don't worry I ll tell you in the next lines ;)

We are a team of young students members of EUforIA that stands for EUROPEANS UNITED INFORMED ACTION.
The question that someone reading this would now ask is..."What is EUforIA ??"...well that's actually a good question before I tell you what this blog is about.

EUforIA :

Where? GENEVA based organisation coming soon in other European countries

When? Not so much time ago...just since Spring 2007

Who? Founded by 6 European students who met in an exchange year

Now the big question is WHAT ARE EUforIA's GOALS?

EUforIA s goals include but are not limited to the following:

1. Educate and inform young people about global challenges
2. Stimulate youth to become active and to get involved
3. Encourage multiple points-of-view and critical thinking
4. Cultivate a sense of global responsibility and solidarity within European youth
5. Communicate messages in ways that appeal to young people
6. Promote informed action, responsibility, solidarity
7. Strengthen public recognition of young leaders visions

Go check http://www.euforiaction.org/ to find much more information ;)

So far EUforIA organised 4 successfull events :

1. EYS08 in Geneva
2. EYW on Migration and intercultural dialogue
3. EYD Concump(ac)tion 2009
4. EYS09

It was actually today when we were in the closing cerimony of the EYS09 that I told Nathan ( soon you'll know who he is...) that we could create a blog where we could share with you all the pre-event of the next big EUforIA event which we are organising.

That's more or less what happened some hours ago...right now I am here in my wonderful room writing to you and I am enthousiastic about it and also Nathan was even if he didn't know I was going to do it so fast :P

Let's go back to the event ...

The event we are organising it is the ELAYS,EUforIA Latin America Youth Summit,a 4 days event which will take place during the last days of April - beginnning of May 2010 in Geneva.

What the organising team of the Elays is going to do is to share with you the whole organisation process from now till the event.

We will try to tell you as much as we can about the organisation and much more...yeah,much more because I think that this should be a space where we can be free to tell you whatever we need to tell you about our committment,our passions,our difficulties,our challenges etc.etc.etc.

BUT...WHAT IS THE ELAYS ABOUT???

Well...you'll find out in the next posts that will be written :P ...be patient and if you are not maybe you can find out some info on the EUforIA web site!!!

I hope that this blog would be interesting for all of you and for the other EUforIAns who can follow our work step by step :)

Next episode...coming soon..;)

Alessia (co-president ELAYS)