After the election of the new Board for the period 2014-2016, the first meeting was held in Fossanova, where one our oldest Member Organization is based: Kamaleonte, an Italian Ngo which works for social inclusion by using the methods of Experiental Learning.
They organized for the new Board, a teambuilding activity. The aim was get to know each other’s better and learn how to work together in a new team.
THE MEETING
On 21 of August the Board and the Coordination office met in the small village of Fossanova to start our work. We had an amazing experience!
We decided to dedicate the whole first day to Team building as it was the very first time the whole group gathered together for a Board meeting since the last election. Some of us we didn’t know each other really and taking some quality time to have some activities was a reveal!
Thanks to our member organization Kamaleonte we were using experiential learning to try to understand WHO we are in the team, WHAT we would like to give as our personal resources, HOW we would like to implement it within the team and above all: respect each other as a team! It was a success!
We would like to thank again Giuseppe ROSSI, Domenico di NUZZO, Mario D’AGOSTINO and all Kamaleonte team for this useful and very well organized experience.
The next day we started quite energetic discussing first legal responsibilities of the Board members and responsibility of the Board as an employer (very good to understand before in what our role consists in the legal framework). Following this role and responsibilities line we also played a small quizz on NGO’s Governance. We also used the “quiz method” to review the financial issues of our network: because it is never too much to remember incomes and expenses.
The next step was to review how do we take decisions as a Board and for this we will prepare a single document with rules and procedures accessible to everyone.
We took time to discuss and review the previous Y-E-N projects: first and second activities of the Work Plan in Armenia and in Poland (we managed to collect material on the situation of social Inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities in different countries; two different approaches were used in the two seminars and it gave the chance to see the topic of social Inclusion from different perspectives); we discussed about the European Youth Event (EYE 2014) held in Strasbourg in May 2014 in which Y-E-N brought 38 young people who took part actively in the event with some frustration, but also good moments: it was the very first experience for some of them. We reviewed also the Partnership Building Activity (PBA) in Bulgaria this past June and the Study session “Social Rights are Human Rights II” in the European Youth Center of Budapest which was a success for many participants as well: the mood was very good and the expectations about a follow-up are quite high! Good Job guys! You can see pictures of all of these events on our Facebook page or on this website.
Later in the afternoon we discussed about future events such as the last activity of the Work Plan in November, the event in UYD Mollina “H.O.M.E” about migration, the strategic partnership KA2, the new Work Plan and the T4T 2015. We will be working until the next Board meeting to set up strategies and finalize what is needed!
Next step was to work on the yearly Board strategy; also because there were new members in the Board. We reviewed our Vision 2020 and the results of the General Assembly 2014 and came up with 5 objectives for our work as a Board. We also established the Activity Plan for 2015.
“SAY procedures” was a very important topic in our discussion, we had a roundtable of exchanging ideas for improvements and changes, it took a lot of time and final decisions will be taken after working separately. We will come up with new defined proposal by the next Board meeting, to be clear with rules.